Brand Planning

Why Golden Threads really are Golden

Most business plans don’t fail because of a lack of thinking, they fail because of too much of it.

Pages of analysis; decks full of data. Dozens of observations, each one valid, each one interesting, each one quietly competing for attention. By the time it all lands in a plan, something has gone wrong, not because the inputs were weak, but because nothing has been chosen.

This is where planning often loses its power. It becomes a record of everything that’s true, rather than a guide to what actually matters.

What cuts through that complexity isn’t more structure or more slides. It’s the discipline of finding a small number of golden threads…insights that don’t just describe the situation, but explain it. Insights that carry logic; that connect cause and consequence. Insights that make it obvious why certain choices need to be made and others don’t.

A golden thread isn’t just a nice observation: it’s something sharper. It has tension in it. It reveals a gap, a contradiction, an opportunity that can’t be ignored. And crucially, it doesn’t stop at diagnosis. It runs all the way through to what you do next.

You can see this most clearly in how we approach planning at The Crow Flies. The starting point is familiar enough: a broad situational analysis that takes in the market context, the company brand, the consumer, the competitors. But instead of trying to carry everything forward, the work is distilled into a tight set of enablers and blockers, the forces helping or hindering growth.

But even that isn’t the end point. Those enablers and blockers are pushed further, clustered into a small number of key questions. Not generic prompts, but focused challenges that the business genuinely needs to solve. Questions that create direction. Questions demand answers.

And then comes action. Each key question becomes an “Obsession”, a platform for doing, not just thinking. Something the organisation can rally around, execute against, and measure.

But what holds it all together are those golden threads. They’re the connective tissue between each stage; the logic behind the Key Questions. The justification for the Obsessions. Without them, the process becomes mechanical. With them, coherent.

And that coherence matters because one of the biggest challenges in any organisation isn’t a lack of intelligence, it’s a lack of alignment: different teams pulling in slightly different directions. Different interpretations of what matters. Different priorities competing for time and resource.

The golden threads cut through that. They give people a shared understanding of what’s going on and why. They make decisions feel less arbitrary and more inevitable. When you can trace a clear line from insight to action, it’s easier to commit and focus. Easier to say no – to sacrifice – the things that don’t fit, which is ultimately, the point. Planning isn’t about capturing everything you know, it’s about deciding what you’re going to do about it. The more clearly you can see the threads that run through your situation, the easier that decision becomes.

It’s not about simplicity, it’s about sharpness, which too often in business and with brand plans is exactly what’s missing.

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David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy, innovation and brand planning company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. Talk to us if you need a strategic diagnosis of your portfolio and an action plan that will drive meaningful commercial change.

Brands and businesses with foundations of stone

Oho! Back to work after a long, hot Summer, and it’s the best time to be thinking about getting strong foundations in place for your brand or business. With a tough economy and challenging budgets, the way to grow is to ensure every precious penny you spend on your end consumer or customer is working as hard as it can for you.

The Crow Flies can help you do this – our ‘caw’ offers will give you rigourous research diagnosis, laser-focused strategy, impactful innovation & effective planning to ensures you can impact your market at scale. Get in touch we’d love to chat!

Crow Essentials / Planning

Over the 10 years (well, 11 actually) we’ve been helping businesses, organisations and brands with their planning it never ceases to amaze us how often ‘planning’ is thought of as just a matter of templates and a timeline.

It’s simply not.

What you need is a well specified process that links critical growth insights with action; stakeholder involvement and alignment at the right moments, and above all, embracing the reality that only with sacrifice and ruthless focus can you can genuinely impact the market.

We’re really proud of our Hourglass Planning approach. If you need help with your planning, whether it’s for an organisation as a whole, a brand, or category get in touch to experience how a tight plan unlocks confidence and the belief in growth.

Brand Growth: More Is Rarely More

Increasingly, the pressure is on brand marketeers and the businesses they serve to do more to drive growth with ever tightening budgets. When brands are being challenged from many different quarters, be it own label challengers or agile, ‘edgy’ brands, the endless temptations of “new is better, old is dead”, and lubricated by a soup of increasingly capricious consumers, you can understand why. ‘Spare’ investment to test and learn, with the acceptance that elements could likely fail, feels like a luxury from a bygone era.

This can lead to the poorly informed seeking ‘new news’ and worshipping at the alters of false marketing Gods. Tempted by the lurid snake oil charms of the next best thing, much activity intended to build brands and enhance company value, often has the opposite effect. In the rush to do more, with less, it’s wise to pause and consider if there are more effective alternatives for growth. Here are a few growth alternatives to counter ‘the usual suspects’:

Issue 1: ‘salami slicing’ your brand’s product quality.
At a time when the cost of goods and taxes have risen so sharply and beyond any sensible forecast, it’s only natural that attention turns to how these costs can be reduced. But when it comes to changes in product quality, a snip here and there, perhaps imperceptible in the short term, or invisible inside the business, will be noticed by those outside, if not immediately, then soon. Remember that consumers migrating away from your brand is likely to be imperceptible in the short term, but very noticeable not long after – and difficult to stop by that point.

Growth Alternative…
Understand what your product truth is and relentlessly protect and amplify it. Great brands are built from undeniable, defensible and owned product truths, often a key foundation of what makes your brand distinctive. Once you know this, you can look for cost savings that support your brand, e.g. cheaper, more sustainable packaging or actually you may find you can add cost because the value exchange reinforces the very thing that consumers buy your brand for.

Issue 2: Fight on more fronts. Win more victories.
It’s easy to slip into a ‘more is more’ attitude without realising it, or believing that in today’s tech-enabled world (a) we can manage this and (b) we can manage this effectively. And initially it can feel energising…. new frontiers for brand growth? Whoopee! Wrong. Not only will you drive yourself burn out, it’s unlikely, unless you really do have considerable, sustained, investment, that all this new stuff will even be noticed. Media fragmentation doesn’t mean personalisation. It means more opportunities to be missed. New messaging on the brand doesn’t mean ‘new news’ and excitement, it means dissonance for your consumer versus what they love you for. Tech doesn’t drive enablement and efficiently. It drives endless filler that fills up the working day with low value-add.

Growth Alternatives…
(i) Decide what not to do.
Virtually everyone, and certainly most organisations collectively, have eyes bigger than their stomachs. Stop prioritising from a long list; instead sacrifice to get a short list. If you’re building a brand, repeatable, scalable consistency is a win-win, so it pays to remember the power of refreshed repetition.

(ii) Don’t get bored with your positioning.
As humans we only have so much mental processing capacity and brain space to consider things. If you’re of the opinion that someone will consider your brand more important, or for longer, than their family, friends, job, or dog, then bon chance and viel glück. Find out what people love about you and then reinforce and leverage the hell out of it. Resist endlessly extending the agenda.

Issue 3: Following in the competitor furrow rather than ploughing it yourself.
When the competitor grass looks greener it can be oh-so tempting to try to mimic your way to success. But who wants more of the same when they’re already happy with what they’ve got? In truth if you closely align to your competition, you are more likely to fall into their shadow even more.

Growth Alternative…
Remember the Magnet and the Mirror.
Step back and confront some hard realities. Knowing what elements of your category you may need to ‘mirror’ for reassurance, and what elements of your brand are your leadership ‘Magnets’ will prevent you from being pulled in different directions.

Rigourous diagnosis, born from well-specified consumer research. Simplicity of focus when developing activity. Fighting on just a few fronts that matter to consumer and brand, sacrificing the others. Scaling with as much effort as you can muster, year in year out. That’s the alternative growth prognosis we recommend this year.

Gael Laurie is Brand Building Director of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. gael@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670 or +44 (0) 7885 408367; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2025

Crow Chronicle – unlocking the power of great plans

Ah, Crow Friends, please find attached for your delight and cawsome delectation this Spring’s Crow Chronicle, which this season is mostly focusing on plans and planning. Now, yes, here at Crow we are a brand building business, but creating great plans and much bigger than that. Whether it’s the plan for the whole business; a BU; a function or a brand portfolio or range, the power of a compelling plan, and the process that gets you there is often under-appreciated.

A great planning process aligns and unites the whole business. A great process not only delivers a plan that everyone then works to, but also drives engagement because of the confidence it creates.

A great plan focuses minds. Too often plans are flabby, unfocused and don’t talk to the key issues at play. The Chronicle offers a few tips and thought-starters for how to ensure this doesn’t happen.

Us Crows are absolute converts to the power of a great plan to drive a business positively forward. It takes effort, commitment, guts and no end of cat-herding, but get it right, and the domino effect you can create in the business will repay that investment in time and energy thrice over*

Enjoy the read!

Link here: Crow Chronicle on Planning

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*Yes, Crow said ‘thrice’ there. It’s a word that is not used often enough. Like ‘nuptials’, ‘egregious’, or ‘snollygoster’

Brand humility

When managing brands client-side, I used to advise every new starter in the marketing team to write down all their associations with the brand on their starting day, particularly so if they were new to the company, and keep it for future reference.

Because from that day forward, their immersion into a biased world would begin – both overtly, being professional and getting thoroughly up to speed with the brand, and tacitly, taking on (typically non-consciously) the cultural or group beliefs, myths, opinions and legends of that brand, like layers accreting one upon the next.

Much of the immersion is required to run the brand of course. And much is positive; after all, if a Brand Manager can’t champion a brand, who the heck can? But many of those layers – and it can be difficult to spot which – become biases or curved lenses which distort the truth. And distortions of the truth mean that you can’t easily stand back and have an honest, objective, critical awareness of the brand and how it’s really standing relative to the other players and competitors.

So view your brand with humility. Ensure that you are researching the brand well and researching it with dispassion and regularity, giving yourself the tools to more accurately wear your target consumers’ shoes, even if they do whiff a bit. Yes, publicly beat the drum; but privately be tough on the brand. That’s the path to making the best decisions.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2023

Hourglass Brand Planning

Brands only get built when the activity they implement is noticed and influences attitudes and behaviour of their intended.

Too often though, impacting the market falls down because brand strategy (assuming it exists) doesn’t get effectively translated through the process of a brand plan. And great brand plans require rigour and focus to get down to the one or two things that really matter to consumer and brand. It sounds easy, but it isn’t.

At The Crow Flies, we call our approach ‘Hourglass planning’ because it goes broad in the market analysis, then narrows to ensure everything is focused on delivering for the brand, before widening again as activities are defined and agreed.

However, whatever the shape or the name, there are key elements you really need to work through to develop a plan that will actually make the difference you want.

In the analysis, go broad, and go deep. You need to ‘hear’ the different opinions in your business to sort out which are relevant, which are opinion, and which need to investigated through your consumer research. You’ve got to be consumer focused, but you’ve also got to get the plan through internal stakeholders, so you need to really hear them and deal with their concerns (or ideas).

Choose what’s important. Don’t forget in situational analysis the human act of sensemaking. Research will illuminate and inform, not make the decision. Be prepared to use judgement to choose between competing options. You’re looking for company or brand strengths that are distinctive, defensible, ownable and leverageable, or competitor weakness that are the same. Boil it all down. Focus on the few enablers and blockers of growth because these will be at the heart of your action plan.

Be clear on who you’re competing for and evaluate and test everything through their lens.

Ensure you have long term foundations in place. Purpose, mission, vision are not interchangeable. You need to know the role of each and how it helps you make clear decisions that more often than not, are right. And don’t confuse brand purpose with social purpose.

Only have a small number of action platforms that flow directly out of the diagnosis. If you can’t see the insight threads from the diagnosis at the top of the process to the actions at the end, then your plan is likely misdirected, and you’ll struggle to get buy in and engagement.

Great brand plans sacrifice. Don’t confuse this with prioritisation. Too often, prioritisation is a pretence that some things are more important but, through sleight of hand, we can still do everything. You can’t. Kill stuff properly and just focus on what’s really important.

Brand activities that deliver against the essentials: we have yet to see an effective brand plan that does not deal with three themes: the brand’s ‘mental availability’, its ‘physical availability’ and bridge between the two, trial & repeat. The 4P’s fit here.

Our experience in brand planning is built from both client side and agency experience. If we can help you with your planning challenge, get in touch.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1283 295100; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh.

Brand Planning

Don’t Slice Your Salami

I heard the expression ‘salami slicing’ a few years ago by someone describing the effect of small cost cutting steps on a product’s cost of goods, one then another, again and again, over a long period of time. Individually consumers didn’t notice, and research response was broadly neutral, so internally they got approved… again and again. But, fast forward a few years; now consumers have noticed the aggregate effect and have been slowly drifting away. And now, the stark reality of a poor product spiralling irreversibly downwards is a much bigger challenge.

Reflecting on this experience, it seems the lesson is more relevant than ever today. Brands are being battered on two sides; on the one hand, consumers prioritising value and price and switching to own label brands and discounter offerings; on the other, soaring cost of goods that aren’t easily passed on to consumers.

And time and again in our research, we’re seeing consumers increasingly suspicious of manufacturers and retailers, expecting them to cut product quality, or offer less, to make cost savings. They recognise it, but they’re certainly not happy about it

As a brand owner, what to do then? Faced with short term pressures to find ways to cut costs and continue to grow a brand, how can a marketeer achieve not undermine long-term brand strengthening and with it, a sustainable, profitable growth? Here’s what we’ve learnt through our research:

It may come as a surprise, but consumers are open to change on some product areas, so long as they don’t compromise its performance. Of all the Marketing ‘P’s’ – packaging materials and formats (Product ‘P’) are one that if done right can open up new usage occasions, new distribution outlets and even new audiences as well as providing an opportunity to improve a product’s carbon footprint at the same time.
Packaging design, whilst rarely the white knight in shining armour we’d like it to be, in combination with clever pack format changes, on-position refreshed design can really enhance brand perceptions
There are areas where you should never compromise – and most certainly Positioning. Ensure you are crystal clear what your brand stands for in consumers’ minds and what makes it distinctive from its’ competitors – this should be where your guardrails go up and the investment in dramatizing the positioning (communications for example) protected.
Don’t be tempted to grow your brand by product category stretch – this is a big risk with questionable returns and could easily result in ‘salami slicing’ your resource, your focus, and your product, sacrificing the core of what your brand stands for bit by bit, slice by slice.

If you’re looking for more insight in diagnosing how your brand is seen today, what the options are for the future and then what to do, do get in touch. We’ll help you resist the temptation to slice the salami ever thinner.

Gael Laurie is Brand Building Director at The Crow Flies, a research, brand strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. gael@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh.

Brand Planning: the bridge from strategy to action

If you’re a marketeer in one of the many businesses, who, courtesy of HMRC, are approaching your year end at the end of March, you’re now thinking about brand planning. Brand planning is a vital building block of all business as well as marketing, but it is often treated as something that ‘just happens’, for which common sense alone is good enough to do an adequate job, and gets steered by finance or strategy.

Unless marketeers apply greater rigour and ownership to the discipline of planning, we will limit our ability to deliver the primary aim of brand building companies, to positive impact target customers to effect successful change. And if we can’t do this, we won’t be taken seriously by others in the business.

As it is, sadly, most brand plans don’t get implemented. Why?

Confusing tactics with strategy. Getting excited by and jumping straight to the things you want to do. “Strategy” is an amplifying word, added to other terms to give them a sense of greater importance. Planning embraces three phases, each with a specific goal, sequentially linked and each distinct.

Diagnosis: understanding the situation the brand (or company) is in, and why.
Decide: working out how do we deal with the situation we face. Where do we want to be? What are the options for getting there cognisant of our competitive situation? This is the strategy.
Do: the plans or tactics. Working out what the few, high impact, activities are that we need to execute in order to achieve our strategy. Being clear on what the distractions are.

Getting the diagnosis wrong based on the situational analysis, likely caused by data gaps, overbearing opinions or underplaying owned strengths of the brand or a competitor

Derailed process due to misalignment. Mid-way through the process an intervention from a senior leader questions the work so far, losing momentum and bursting the precious bubble of confidence that had been created.

Choosing the wrong competitive strategy e.g. not leveraging a real strength or perhaps taking on a competitor in the wrong way.

Failing to unite, align or enthuse key stakeholders involved in signing off or implementing.

In response to these issues, we have developed ‘Hourglass’ brand planning, reflecting the shape of the process planning needs to follow. Starting broad, narrow at the centre when focusing on the needs of the customer and the business and then flowing out again to the actions.

Hourglass planning is built off a small number of critical foundations, themselves rooted in the insight that cause planning to trip up:

Start by going broad in analysis; not just in terms of the content and approach to gathering data and making sense of it, but also in listening to the perspectives, opinions or strongly held views of key stakeholders in the process.
Make sense and choose what’s important. There are lots of tools available to aid with situational analysis but what’s missed is the human act of sensemaking and choice. You don’t want to end up with a very comprehensive but utterly useless synthesis of the current state. It’s what you choose to pull out and take action on that’s important. You’re looking for company or brand strengths that are distinctive, defensible, ownable, leverageable or competitor weakness that are the same. Boil it all down. Focus on the few enablers and blockers of growth because these will be at the heart of your action plan.
Be clear on who you’re competing for and evaluate and test everything through their lens.
Ensure you have long term foundations in place. Purpose, mission, vision are not interchangeable. You need to know the role of each and how it helps you make clear decisions that more often than not, are right.
A small number of action platforms that flow directly out of the diagnosis. If you can’t see the insight threads from the diagnosis at the top of the process to the actions at the end, then your plan is likely misdirected and you’ll struggle to get buy in and engagement.
Brand activities that deliver against the essentials: we have yet to see an effective brand plan that does not deal with three themes: the brand’s ‘mental availability’, its ‘physical availability’ and bridge between the two, trial & repeat. The 4P’s fit here.
Great brand plans sacrifice. Don’t confuse this with prioritisation. Too often, prioritisation is a pretence that some things are more important but, through sleight of hand, we can still do everything. You can’t. Kill stuff properly and just focus on what’s really important.

Our experience in brand planning is built from both client side and agency experience. If we can help you with your planning challenge, get in touch.