Profile: The science of masterplanning
By Hugh Jordan. Making Sense. Shortlisted for Marketing’s Research Agency of the Year for the past two years and recently named one of Research Magazine’s top agencies in 2009, Sense Worldwide is beginning to get real recognition for its work.
But how is it that an agency counting Johnson & Johnson, Unilever and Nike among its clients has managed to stay under the radar for so long?
Perhaps it is because the outfit’s work eludes classification.
“I don’t know if what we do is research,” says Jeremy Brown, Sense Worldwide’s CEO. “We are a research house, certainly, but what we do is more encompassing than that. We prototype ideas and provide strategic insight. We do all the thinking for brands so that they can then go away, write briefs and put the ideas into action.”
Brown and his team have dubbed their work ‘masterplanning’.
“You get all kinds of planners, from digital planners to marketing planners, but each of these operate in their own little boxes and all of them have the brand as their main focus,” he explains. “We put the consumer at the centre of everything. Our role is to understand the permission a brand has to operate in consumers lives.”
One of the foundations of Sense Worldwide’s success has been the Sense Network. Long before the likes of Facebook and MySpace arrived on the scene, Sense had created its very own social network dedicated to research.
“Ten years ago, when we first started out, there was so much noise around the dotcom industry,” says Brown. “A lot of that turned out to be all mouth and no trousers. What we set up with the Sense Network has been the exact opposite. At that time we had effectively developed Web 2.0… we created one of the first social networks.”
The initial Sense Network involved people from a range of professions: authors, politicians, economists, businessmen, lawyers and artists – 20 people brought together to discuss various issues. That has grown into 1,800 people in 40 countries, speaking 35 different languages. As many of Sense Worldwide’s clients are global companies, this kind of local knowledge proves invaluable.
And the mix of professions in the network remains as diverse as ever. When an air freshener brand approached the agency wanting to do for its market what Evian had done for water, Sense contacted a pagan witch – expert in traditional herbal remedies – and a chemical outbreak specialist, both through its network.
Another tool in the agency’s arsenal is what it calls a Research Amnesty. Brands are encouraged to dump all their data on Sense – no matter how trivial – which is then synthesised by the agency and key learnings drawn from it.
Now, Sense plans to take this idea a step further. Following on from a piece of award-winning research it carried out for the Discovery Channel, Sense is collaborating with NESTA, the UK’s innovation body, and setting up a brand co-creation day.
On November 17th brands operating in non-conflicting markets, including Vodafone, Diageo and Hovis will participate on- and offline, sharing business learnings, insight and strategy about the hard-to-reach but highly lucrative 25-to-39 year-old male demographic. This type of brand co-creation, Brown believes, will become much more common in the years to come.
“In the future brands will be a lot more open to sharing information,” he says. “After all it is in brands’ interests to learn from others around them and stretch their own knowledge.”
And with Sense Worldwide playing the part of middleman to perfection, there seems little risk of the agency slipping off the radar again any time soon.
