Martin Weigel on the crisis of planning

Martin Weigel, Head of Planning at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, writes an inspiring manifesto on the need for those of us who work in marketing to escape our bubbles, reconnect with real people, staff our organisations more representatively, and rediscover our ability to talk to a broad spectrum of society.

“And so it is that – privileged, unrepresentative, disconnected and with an overinflated sense of its understanding and common values – marketing and advertising professionals have come to rely on the sweeping platitudes of ‘Millennials’ and ‘Gen Z’, happy to believe that people born within certain years are all the same, happy by implication to reject the concept of segmentation and of consumers holding different perceptions and experiences, and happy to believe that some kind of powerful, magical invisible force is at work that determines that people who are born in the same year will all have exactly the same opinions and attitudes.”