The year was 1965 when two British ad men—working separately from one another—each had an epiphany: in order to be truly successful, advertising needed to be less about gut feel and more about audience insights.

Steven Pollitt and Stephen King have since gone down in history as the forefathers of Account Planning: the discipline that introduced research methodology and rigor into advertising.

Fast-forward 45 years and Planning is an established discipline. Within advertising, that is. Within web, Planning—or Web Strategy as it’s sometime called—is still in its infancy. Within web, we’re just now catching wind of the Pollitt/King idea.

This is somewhat surprising. Planning and Web Strategy are, in many ways, kindred disciplines. And there’s a lot of experience and learning for Web Strategy to draw from. Consider the following:

  • The Planner is often said to represent the consumer in the advertising-creation process. The Web Strategists can similarly be described as representing the end-user in the website-creation process.
  • Both titles are responsible for strategy, meaning they help establish goals and guidelines for subsequent creative development. They are the people who do the research and analyze the findings so the creatives don’t have to.
  • Both titles are heavily engaged in the beginning stages of new projects. They have but tertiary involvement in creative development only to come back, post-launch, to review performance after-the-fact.

There are, of course, differences as well:

  • Account Planners build brands. Often through advertising, and sometimes through digital channels. Web Strategists, on the other hand, build online brands and this commonly through the creation of web applications.
  • Web Strategist consequently need a level of technical expertise uncommon among Planners. Not only does this involve Social Media and Web Analytics, but also working knowledge of Information Architecture, User Experience, and more.

These differences are substantial but not game changing; they don’t change the fact that Planning and Web Strategy are fundamentally about the same thing: understanding people. Truth is, it’s only what is done with that understanding that really differs.

More important is the fact that Planning has been around for a long time; it has had decades with which to refine its approach to “understanding”. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the use or disuse of qualitative research in the discovery phase of new projects.

Qualitative research is, of course, the opposite to quantitative research. And whereas “qual” is unstructured, messy, and abstract, “quant” is the numerical, absolute, and unambiguous.

Ask any Planner and he or she will tell you that you need both qual and quant in order to create a well-informed strategy—digital or otherwise. Qual helps you explore the why and the how; quant identifies the what, the when, and the where.

Perhaps it’s obvious, but knowing what someone did doesn’t tell us why they did it, and it’s the why that really speaks to the question of who they really are. Yet despite this, Web Strategists have fallen into the habit of relegating qual research to “reactive” measures such as eye tracking and usability studies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for those type of studies, but they are reactive in the sense that something needs to be built before it can be tested. Put another way: we’re not asking the audience for their ideas; we’re asking for their opinions about ours.

The Planner know this all to well. That’s why, if you ask one about his or her work, they will tell you about things like need states, preferences, attitudes, and culture. Talk to a Web Strategist, and you’re much more likely to learn about Bounce Rates, Page Rank, and CPCs.

One approach is exploratory. The other reactive. The former gets to the heart of why audiences think and act the way they do, the other simply affirms what they did, adding where and when that action took place.

This is not enough. Without qualitative insight, what choice do the Web Strategist have other than to take the “gut-feel” approach that Pollitt and King so desperately wanted to avoid? To be successful, web applications must satisfy a need, and needs don’t show up in analytics reports.

Web Strategists would do well, therefore, to look to Planning for advice on anything related to the why and the how—the qualitative aspects of strategy development. They’ve got the quant and technology aspects covered, but in terms of Pollitt/King, they still have a lot to learn.