As planners, we are often hauled into a pitch team to provide insights into a market we know nothing about. That doesn't stop us, and neither should it - getting to grips with a new product category is a simple process:
Immerse yourself in the category. Proceed to your favourite search engine and type in the key terms, for example 'erectile dysfunction', and see what comes up.
Follow links and print out articles that show any form of relevance - do NOT try and read them on-screen. Strategy is tough. Trees get hurt. Get over it.
Now here comes the juicy part. Type in EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT into your favourite search engine. This might be something like: "The communication strategy for [brand name] in an emerging economy during August". Play around and see what you get. Don't play around too much - you'll go blind.
Do a www.warc.com search. This is a database of communication case studies. There's some twaddle in there, but you'll soon learn to sift the data from the dros. You don't have membership? Talk to me, I'll get you a great deal. Tell you what, I'll throw in a free copy of pacman. You're killing me. Anyway, no self-respecting strat planner should be without WARC. If you're going to a gunfight, you need a gun.
Get in your car and drive to your nearest business school. Go to the library and ask to do a literature search. Yeah, I know it's not literature, but humour them. Pay them the R30 or whatever (you usually get Emerald and EBSCO in the mix) and search to your brain's content. Better still, some universities will do the run for you at a very small fee (Univ. of Stellenbosch offer a great service). Although that allows you to spend the afternoon in an unfocused group down at the local, it's not the real thing - you will miss the thrill of the chase. Also, the young voluptuous librarian might miss signposts on the infobahn that would have led her to your nirvana - the site of all sites, a place any http would be proud to rest its colon.
Get your AMPSoid (usually your allocated media strategist) to do an AMPS run. I strongly suggest you go on the course (I think they call it the Telmar crosstab intro course). It's free and you get biscuits.
If you've read this far and you don't have Adobe Acrobat on your computer, which allows you to read pdf files, you should be ashamed of yourself. You need two forward slashes.
If you want local socioeconomic data, visit www.statssa.gov.za. Futurefact is like a totally awesome resource on trends, but if you don't go to the seminar you have to pay for it. Look, there's probably a lot of local resources I don't know about, so that's why point 10 is so important.
Send me your handy URL with a one-liner of what the site provides. I will publish the complete list on stratplanning.com.
Sid Peimer is the cruel and sadistic camp counsellor at Boot Camp, an intensive five-day course for strategic planners in advertising and marketing. Further details at www.stratplanning.com/bootcamp.htm.
