The Customer Hat Isn't Optional: Why Planners Must Wear It at Every Stage

Customer expectations keep rising. So does complexity. If brands want to stay relevant, planning needs to change, not just how we do it, but where it sits.

Marketing has no shortage of strategists, analysts, creatives, and customer champions. But one role increasingly links them all: the customer planner. Often overlooked, often misunderstood, and more essential than ever.

The DMA Planning Hub is dedicated to championing good customer planning and inspiring the next generation of marketers; a team of special marketing forces who, after seeing the rise of machines, escape the prison of expectations and have become thought leaders of good fortune, helping the innocent CMO and downtrodden CRM exec.

This new series of Planning Hub articles takes a forward-looking lens on human-led, AI-assisted planning. Derived from expert wisdom, we break down the core sections of planning, from audience strategy to measurement, to make them accessible to new audiences while reaffirming their importance for seasoned practitioners. The aim is to show that while AI offers powerful tools, it is human insight, empathy, and judgment that must remain at the heart of customer engagement.

The Planner as the Connector

Many organisations still treat planning as a handover point: brief in, campaign out. But real customer planning runs deeper. It’s about pulling together data, tech, creative, and commercial goals—and making sense of it from the customer’s side of the table.

“In a more complex than ever marketing environment, customer planning is about simplifying the chaos.”
– Adam Cochrane

Planners aren’t just fixing broken briefs. They’re asking: do these segments make sense? Are we solving the right problems? Does this journey even work? And crucially, what does the customer experience feel like?

It’s a Career, Not a Catch-All

Planning is rarely labelled clearly, especially in smaller teams. Sometimes it sits under client services. Sometimes under data. Often, it’s no one’s full-time job. But it should be.

“If you’re curious, commercially minded, and customer-obsessed, planning can be your home.”
– Susan Corless

Good planners aren’t always strategists. Or analysts. Or creatives. But they understand enough of each to translate between disciplines. And that makes them invaluable, especially when marketing structures are getting more tangled, not less.

Who Actually Owns the Customer?

That question still stumps a lot of brands. Ownership tends to fragment; CRM here, media there, experience somewhere else. And in that gap, things fall apart.

“The planner is one of the only roles with permission to step back and ask: does this join up?” – Scott Logie

Customer planning doesn’t have to mean new headcount. But it does need clearer remit. Whether it’s client-side or in agency teams, someone has to look across journeys, not just down channels.

It's Not CRM. It's Not Just Strategy. It’s Something Else.

Planning too often inherits CRM baggage: narrow, tactical, boxed in. In reality, it's the opposite. It’s where commercial thinking, creative ideas, and data activation meet.

“In the age of AI, planners are the ones who know what to do with the output.”
– Janet Snedden

It’s also the only discipline designed to prevent a proliferation of content from becoming a flood of irrelevance. With AI, planning isn’t replaced, it becomes even more critical. Because it’s the planner who decides: what’s worth saying, and why now?

Where Do We Go from Here?

Customer planning doesn’t need a rebrand. It needs recognition. As a career path. As a strategic function. As the thing that turns smart thinking into connected action.

The Customer Engagement Committee examines the interplay of creativity, data, and technology to explore loyalty and acquisition. They do so with research, events, and thought leadership. Apply to the councils here.

You can also join the waitlist for Customer Engagement 2025 where we address the questions of engagement, loyalty, retention, and customer win-back for the benefit of all UK marketers and consumers.