Have you ever wondered how the men and women who do financial reporting write headlines for daily stock market results? On in today’s NYT read “Tech and Health Care Firms Lean Broad Rally.”  Some of it is pretty easy: They look at the big winners and losers and simply declaim.  It’s data centric.

When less clear cut they need to put on analytical thinking caps, telling us how various market factors impacted buying and selling. Housing starts. Fed reports on interest rates. Impending wars.  This approach relies on implications and deductions about data and facts.  But what happens when the data is contradictory? How do they come up with a headline?  That’s what master brand planning is.  (Master brand planning drives all brand activities; not just daily marketing and communications tactics.)

Master brand strategy is never clean and tidy.  There are always scads of factors. Lots of data. Lots of targets. Everything has to go into the stock pot for the brand boil down.  Headline writers have a half day to write financial report ledes. Brand planners don’t have that luxury. We have to write a headline that encapsulates past, current and future value and our deadline is presentation day. I sometime envy reporters with more exact deadlines.

Peace.