You Gotta Love 'Em

We’ve all done it.
The brief comes in for a brand, product or service and we turn our noses up.
Not at the opportunity.
At the thing we’re supposed to be promoting.
If we’re going to encourage other people to buy into a brand, we have to be willing to do the same.
You’ve got to love your client’s brands
You’ve got to buy them and encourage everyone in the agency to do the same.
Leave your preconceptions at the door and learn to love it, rather than being happy to simply take the money and run.
It's a bit of Karma, they are buying your "stuff", so you should be buying theirs
Also the more you understand how it works and what people like, the better job you’ll do.
Dietary requirements and allergies permitting of course.

Loving The Status Quo

On Friday I argued that incumbents need to work twice as hard to keep an account, because of how much we all hate to lose something.
But what about the people who think that the incumbent never stands a chance?
Try looking at it this way…
We are all pattern-forming beings.
We like routine, pattern, convention.
We sit in the same seat.
We park in the same space.
We order the same things from the menu.
Because change takes effort.
Evolution hurts.
That’s why we stick with the same bank even though they annoy us.
Why we stay with the same insurer even when the premiums go up.
Why we never cancel those subscriptions, even though there’s a pile of unopened magazines on the coffee table.
Clients are no different – think of how much effort it will take to onboard a new agency, get to know the new contacts, and bring everyone up to speed.
Now, you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got 48 copies of National Geographic to get through.

Agencies Are From Mars, Clients Are From Venus

With apologies to John Gray Ph.D.
In the mid-nineties, the publishing industry enjoyed something of a boon, as desperate couples turned to bookshops for the answers to their dysfunctional relationships.
The book that kicked all this off was John Gray’s bestseller ‘Men are from Mars, Woman are from Venus’.
Now I’m not here to advocate for generalised gender observations, but the overall approach Gray took was a valid one.
You see, Gray understood that we all need each other.
We may share common goals and aspirations, but we start from different places and go about accomplishing them in different ways.
In that sense, it’s a lot like the relationships between agencies and clients.
We may want the same thing, but start from different perspectives and we’ll go about it differently.
We agency people need to look beyond the brief.
Clients need more understanding.
What are the hard business issues behind the brief?
You’ll get to a much more balanced relationship
Also an occasional hug wouldn’t kill you, would it?

Who’s Laughing Now?

This video has been doing the rounds recently, and has unsurprisingly proved a big hit in the agency world. (Video here)
Sure it’s funny and well-observed, but I also find it a little one sided.
Of course there are businesses and individuals out there who act like this, but sketches like this tend to perpetuate an unhealthy culture of ‘us and them’.
Anyone who works in a service role will undoubtedly have moments when a client does something frustrating or nonsensical.
But in a relationship you need to focus on the good things, rather than fixating on the short-comings. Besides which, we’ll be laughing on the other side of our face when the inevitable follow-up video emerges depicting the agency world’s foibles from the clients perspective.
And believe me, there’s a world of great material out there.

Pitching To Win

There’s a whole cottage industry dedicated to helping agencies deliver the perfect pitch.
Books, websites, seminars – there’s some great stuff out there to help nip bad habits in the bud and finesse your approach.
But in amongst all the strategies and methodologies, I think there’s a simple solution that we could all embrace.
It’s a single question – what does the client want to get from the pitch?
In an average pitch scenario there might be five or six agencies parading in front of a client team, showing how clever and creative they can be, that’s a lot of strategies, ideas and media options.
We all put a lot into our own pitches; imagine how hard it is to judge between several, complicated and complex proposals?
The client team might be made up of wildly differing personalities and agendas – from finance and procurement to marketing and communications.
But they’ve all got one thing in common.
They want to choose an easy to understand, inspiring idea that they’ll be proud to own and put their name to.
What they are looking for is simple, what they are looking for is always the same thing.
All every client ever wants is something to believe in