Marketing Lessons Learned from THE PARADISE

Marketing Lessons Learned from THE PARADISE

The Paradise

Now, I’m not one of those Sense and Sensibility types. Little Women…pshaw. And I certainly couldn’t sit through even one episode of Downton Abbey. So, I was probably more surprised than anyone when I was invited to binge watch the first season of The Paradise (Thank you, Netflix). This enterprising BBC series is derived from the famous novel of Émile Zola and follows the popularity of the first English department store, its famous owner John Moray and his “little champion” Denise Lovett, the true marketing genius behind the store’s success. And while the plot twists and turns through themes of big business vs. small business, the role of women at the turn of the century, class struggle and the lives and loves of the people who work there, I became hooked on The Paradise for a completely different reason. I was intrigued by the whimsical way in which The Paradise captured the hearts and minds of their customers as Denise invents modern retail marketing.

With each “new idea,” or what seemed to be a novel concept at the time, I was reminded of the marketing basics from which we sometimes stray.  Now, if you haven’t seen or heard of The Paradise, read on anyway my friend, and I guarantee that you’ll be on the Netflix search bar in no time at all. Here are a few marketing lessons we can all take away from the series:

  1. Have a passion for your customers. If you’re not passionate about what you’re representing, you can’t possibly do a good job. It’s because of Denise’s love for The Paradise — its products and its customers, that desire to surprise and delight everyone who entered its doors — that her marketing schemes are wildly successful.
  2. Marketing and selling go hand in hand. It’s absolutely impossible to be a good marketer if you don’t love selling. Marketing ideas grow around a sales need. And the greater the need, typically the more innovative the solution. In an early episode, a customer, Mrs. Brookmeyer, spends way too much time and money in the store with her bill-paying husband absent. In order to help her save face (and keep from returning all of the goods sold), The Paradise opens its first credit account and uses it as a marketing tool. Necessity really is the mother of invention.
  3. Any good marketer will play the hand they’re dealt. When a baby is found at the steps of the store, Moray immediately contacts a foundling home, but asks the home to wait just a few days until the press could be invited to see how the store was caring for the abandoned child. Then customers are encouraged to visit and contribute to a fund to care for the child. Thus, the first retail cause marketing campaign is born.
  4. Sex sells. But, but only if you’re selling the right way. In Episode 5 Denise has the idea to turn idle time in the store into a “Gentlemen’s afternoon,” where men of the town could buy frills and intimates for their wives. When the affair is deemed socially unseemly, the store recasts the session as a “Private Women’s Lingerie Trunk Show” as a way to apologize and save face with the men’s wives. Does Victoria’s Secret come to mind?
  5. Raise the price and you raise the value. When exotic love birds are introduced in The Paradise, the decision is made to sell them for much more than their purchased value in order to create a sense of scarcity. In short order, the love birds are all the rage with the town’s elite.
  6. Partner marketing can be effective, but only if partners actually behave as partners. During a brief hiatus from working at The Paradise, Denise develops a co-operative of the small traders in the neighboring street to battle the dominating Paradise but the plan falls short when the shop owners can’t find a way to work together.
  7. Find a need and fill it. With photography at its height of popularity, the owner of the Paradise hires a photographer to shoot portraits. After learning that most well-to-do families already had portraits, Denise has the idea to commemorate their visit to the store with a free Paradise portrait postcard, to be proudly displayed on the mantle when they return home. The customers wanted to boast about their visit to The Paradise and the postcard did just the trick.
  8. Good marketing connects with what people love. The local newspaper had been running a very popular serialized ghost story in its weekly edition. The series had captured the imagination of all of the townspeople. So, The Paradise intuitively makes a deal with the paper to host the distribution of the final edition of the story by transforming the store into a life-size reenactment of the castle where the story took place. Experiential Marketing at its finest.

 Certainly, today’s marketers would never THINK to take advantage of the opening of a new Marvel movie, partner with the United Way, sell a $4 cup of coffee or pull New Coke off the shelf, give you a discount for opening a revolving credit account, build an REI climbing wall or send you home with a Jack-in-the-Box antennae ball.  But all of these smart marketing moves and many more can be found by watching The Paradise. Check it out, even if you’re not typically one to stay up late watching the latest remake of Pride and Prejudice.

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Don Low is a principal at Push Design. When he’s not working, he’s turning laps in a pool, riding his road bike, deciding what to make for dinner or cheering on his kids Deidre, Connor and Lucy Low.

 

Series Finale

Your Agency: Inside/Out 

Everything your agency wants you to know but won’t tell you because they don’t want you to fire them. 

A Forbes study* shows that only 41% of all marketing clients have a positive view of their agencies.  Only 38% report they are satisfied with their agencies.  But it doesn’t have to work this way.

Here at Push, we’d like to present a series of articles to help clients better understand and work with their agency. You’re welcome.

Now the eighth in our eight-part installment…

Series Finale

In our first blog we referenced John Gottman’s, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail, citing that the devolution of an agency relationship can sometimes mirror that of any personal relationship. It’s easy for expectations to not be met. Or to feel like needs are not being heard, respected or appreciated.

Bugs Bunny WeddingBut all is not gloom and doom. The beauty of strong agency relationships is that they are mutually beneficial. In this series we’ve attempted to give you insight into the inner workings of an agency so you can better anticipate the headaches and heartaches that inevitably come. Here is a list of the top seven things you can do to make sure your relationship remains healthy and prosperous. It’s the summary of our previous seven articles in this series.

  1. Agencies are golden retrievers. A pat on the head goes a long way. A savvy client knows sincere appreciation is the glue that holds an agency relationship together. Say it, text it, e-mail it, phone it, LinkedIn it, skywrite it, shout it from the rooftops. As the old treatise from  the 60 Second Manager says, “Catch someone doing something right and praise it”.
  2. Make your expectations very clear. When you begin an agency relationship, acquaint them with your work style and how best to communicate with you. Give a lot of feedback in the first weeks so the agency can adjust their project management style to your needs. Don’t assume we work the same way you do. Matter of fact, assume the opposite. The more you tell us, the better we’ll be.
  3. A little humor goes a long way. Most agency-types fell into this business because the the corporate world was too stuffy. We are all pretty loose in our style, even though we can button it up for the board room when needed. We appreciate even the driest attempt at humor. Having a sense of humor with your agency is like trying to speak French when in Paris. Even if you’re not good at it, the French appreciate your willingness to try.
  4. Deadlines drive everything we do. In Blog 7  of the series we stated that fully half of the projects we receive have deadlines that are tight, tight, tight. We live by this mantra,  “If you can just do what you say you’re going to do, you’ll be wildly successful”.  Help us help you. Be crystal clear with your agency. Tell them what you need and by when.
  5. It’s not about the money. Then again, we’re not running a non-profit here. Don’t make budgets a Waterloo. The goal of every agency is to grow so close to the client  a mutual trust around budget planning is fostered.  In Blog 4 of the series we talked about the budget “Who’s on First”. It’s always fair to push back on budgets, but listen to the agency’s point of view. Or, to quote Ronald Regan, “Trust, but verify”.
  6. Client relationships aren’t built over lunch. Good account relationships don’t start out as social outings. The best client relationships are built in the trenches. Delivering successful projects day in and day out. We agency types are definitely relational. But we also know that a relationship with you must be earned.
  7. Have fun. Working with your agency should be the highlight of your day. After all, when do you ever get time and space to think creatively about your work, with people who are there to help facilitate your success? If it’s not fun for you, it’s probably not fun for your agency either.

Thanks for being a part of our Inside/Out series. Please share it with your colleagues if you’ve found it interesting. As an old Hindu proverb states “Only through suffering do we become wise”. If that’s the case, the Principals at Push have all kinds of wisdom to share.

Coming soon:  Agency Personae’s: Profiles in Courage.

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Don Low is a principal at Push. When he’s not working, he’s flip-turning laps in a pool, riding his road bike, rooting his kids on or deciding what to make for dinner.

*Forbes Study

It’ll Take How Long?

Your Agency: Inside/Out 

Everything your agency wants you to know but won’t tell you because they don’t want you to fire them. 

A Forbes study* shows that only 41% of all marketing clients have a positive view of their agencies.  Only 38% report they are satisfied with their agencies.  But it doesn’t have to work this way.

Here at Push, we’d like to present a series of articles to help clients better understand and work with their agency. You’re welcome.

Now the seventh in our eight part installment…

It’ll Take How Long?

Really? A week and a half? For a landing page?

A creative director I know used to say, “Good creative takes time.” “You can have wine or you can have grape juice, your choice.”  Well, that’s half truth and half smokescreen. If we were able to kickoff your project today and work on it uninterrupted we could have
Wile Coyote time bombsomething great for you in a few days. But the reality is there are three other projects ahead of you in the queue, two creatives are out sick and our biggest client just called with a “favor”. We just can’t tell you these things because we don’t want you to feel like you’re not our top priority.

It’s at this point that you may want to reference our earlier blog post where we describe an agency as a well-choreographed beehive. Work is constantly flowing in and out of the agency. There are new projects we’re kicking off, concepts we’re presenting for the first time and projects we’re working frantically to get out of the door. But although you’re not our only client, your business is important to us. And it’s our job to make sure we don’t let you down by missing your deadline.

Most agencies are constantly playing the plate-spinning game, trying to make sure we
are managing internal traffic flow to keep our people fully busy (because that’s how
we make money) while still meeting the daily priorities of our clients (because that’s also how we make money). A successful agency is constantly spinning between these two functions. But the reality of our business is that good work actually does take some Plate spinningtime. We spend our day ideating on new campaigns while finishing work that is in progress.  Creative and production mindsets are completely different. It’s a dance, and usually we do it in an elegant way. We must commit the time necessary to do the kind of quality work you hired us to do, yet we have to make sure we deliver the goods.  In order to be successful we have to be clear, proactive communicators, both inside our agency and out. Here’s how you can mange the beehive:

  1. Give us realistic dates in writing. Let us know your ultimate deadline and other critical deadlines along the way. Don’t ask, “When can you get this to me?” Tell us when you need it.
  2. Ask us to produce a work back schedule, even for medium-sized projects. Then hold us to it. I wish we were better with deadlines, but there are times in the beehive where scheduling steps gets skipped. If it happens, call us out on it and we’ll hop to.
  3. Give us the context that drives your deadlines. Is there a trade show coming up? Does this sitelet correspond with a product launch date? Are you going on vacation? Is your entire professional reputation tied to this deliverable date? Any context will not only put a fire under us, it will also provide opportunities to possibly buy a little more time without inconveniencing anyone.
  4. Coordinate with your internal team to turn things quickly on your end. Often, deadlines are missed because our clients haven’t held up their end of the bargain and it’s embarrassing for us to point it out, even if we’re in the right.
  5. Help us prioritize. The best clients tell us what is time critical and what isn’t. Not that anything should ever slide, but if something has to, we want to make sure it is farther down your priority list.
  6. Batch your requests. Don’t call us with updates and changes six or seven times a day. As a young account manager, I found myself toggling up and down the aisle to the creative group with one request after another. Once a young designer exploded, “How can I finish her first request when she just hit me up with her fifth request of the day?”
  7. Sometimes things happen. We get overwhelmed. Someone gets sick. Something takes more time than expected. Bring it to our attention ASAP and we’ll do everything we can to make it right. A little grace goes a long way.

Agencies are golden retrievers at heart. We’re always trying to please. Sometimes we aren’t as organized as we could be. But with clear communication and sometimes a friendly nudge, we can usually deliver for you time and time again.

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Don Low is a principal at Push. When he’s not working, he’s turning laps in a pool, riding his road bike, rooting his kids on or deciding what to make for dinner.

*Forbes Study

 

Why Didn’t You Make My Requested Changes ?

Your Agency: Inside/Out 

Everything your agency wants you to know but won’t tell you because they don’t want you to fire them. 

A Forbes study* shows that only 41% of all marketing clients have a positive view of their agencies.  Only 38% report they are satisfied with their agencies.  But it doesn’t have to work this way.

Here at Push, we’d like to present a series of articles to help clients better understand and work with their agency. You’re welcome.

Now the sixth in our eight part installment…

Why didn’t you make my requested changes?

We’ve seen it time and again. You’re reviewing the final changes to your website with your agency and you’ve given them very specific instructions. Move this here, change that color, replace an image, move this infographic, re-write a subhead, redo a form, insert a new paragraph.

Two days later you take a look on the staging server and only half of the changes had been implemented.

Looney-Tunes-Character“Why did this happen? Were they not taking notes? How could they have missed it? I couldn’t have been more clear.”

An agency is a creative beehive. Our semi-choreographed dance is filled with purpose, productivity, chaos and teamwork . We’re motivated by happy clients, new business, cool projects, pats on the head and a chance to do something great. And while much of our work is choreographed, we still get into each others way on a regular basis. The best agencies have processes that help, but too much process can result in slower-than-molasses delivery. It’s a fine balance.

When you send us your changes, especially when they are many and varied, it’s likely that  a minimum of three people will be involved in making those changes happen – an account manager, a designer (and sometimes a production designer) and a developer. Even the smallest change requests can easily fall prey to the agency version of the telephone game and it’s not uncommon for something to be missed.

What is the best way to ensure your requested changes are made in a timely (and accurate) manner?

  1. Have one central clearing house for all content. Client changes are missed primarily of version control. Designate one central hub for communication and stick to it. Don’t rely on phone, text, e-mail, etc. for changes. We advocate for project management software like BaseCamp to help facilitate clear communication.
  2. It seems easy, but make sure your content changes are bulleted and bolded. In the heat of battle it’s easy to miss changes if they are part of the body of an e-mail.
  3. Make sure you remain the central contact for all changes. When requested changes are coming from different people on your team, chaos ensues.
  4. The phone is your friend. In the heat of battle, it’s OK to call your agency contact to validate every change and to make sure nothing is being missed.
  5.  Hidden deadlines = mistakes. Working at the last minute often results in mistakes and missed details. Give us real deadlines and let’s hold each other to them. If you are not clear on the deadline, it’s easy for the agency to assume there is more time.

Let’s use a Super Bowl analogy here. When the ball is down in the Red Zone (20 yards to the goal) the team must double their effort to get it over the goal line. Same holds true of your project. As we get closer to the deadline, everyone — client and agency — needs to double down, work hard and communicate clearly to move the ball over the finish.

 

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Don Low is a principal at Push. When he’s not working, he’s turning laps in a pool, riding his road bike, rooting his kids on or deciding what to make for dinner.

*Forbes Study

 

 

A Change Order…For What?

Your Agency: Inside/Out 

Everything your agency wants you to know but won’t tell you because they don’t want you to fire them. 

A Forbes study shows that only 41% of all marketing clients have a positive view of their agencies.  Only 38% report they are satisfied with their agencies*.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Here at Push, we’d like to present a series of articles to help clients better understand and work with their agency. You’re welcome.

Now the fifth in our eight part installment…

——————-

“A change  order…for what?” Part 2 of 2

You’re cruising along on the new social media campaign. It’s been a coyoteclifflittle bumpy to say the least. Your CEO came in at the last minute and had some comments that derailed you for awhile. But now you’re back on track. Your agency has been quietly spinning in the background, meeting deadlines and being just lovely about your requested changes. Then, out of the blue, you receive an e-mail with an attached change order. The e-mail explains that the original scope of work called for two rounds of revisions and your requested changes have resulted in a $5,000 change order fee to the budget.

What? When? How? Why?

Unfortunately, in our business, this scope creep scenario happens all to0 frequently . The behind-the-scenes plot goes something like this:

  1. “Ideation is coming along great! We’re presenting to the client on Tuesday.”
  2. “Cool. We nailed it!”
  3. “Looks like the CEO has come in and asked for a pretty big change in direction. People, we’re going to have to work the weekend to make this happen for our client.”
  4. “Well, that seemed to go well. We’re a little over budget, but we can make it up in production.”
  5. “The client isn’t happy with the images we’ve chosen and wants us to take another look.”
  6. “The client wants us to create a ‘simple’ infographic to explain the new product features on the landing page.”
  7. “The client has some last-minute changes to their their pricing chart.
  8. “The writer just sent us a change order for the work she did re-writing the copy to meet the CEO’s requested changes.”
  9. “Has anyone looked at the budget to see where we are? We’re how far over? Gawd, you’re kidding! Go back to the SOW. Is there anything in there about rounds of revisions? There is? Good. We’re already over budget and still haven’t started production.”
  10. “The client will freak if we send her a $10,000 change order. Do you think she’ll be OK with $5,000? Yeah, let’s try that.”

I’ve never met a client who wanted his/her agency to lose money on a project. But in the scenario above the agency suffers from “Golden Retriever/Ostrich Syndrome”. Most agencies are so eager to please their clients they often stick their head in the sand and ignore budget realities until it’s too late. Agencies HATE talking about scope changes. We hate it! So we just keep holding on, hoping for the finish line. And when the finish line doesn’t come in time, the agency panics.

So, how do we fix it?

A SOW can NEVER be watertight enough to cover every eventuality. Talk about budget early…and often, with your agency. It’s incumbent on the agency to broach a scope change. But the ebb and flow of most projects fill a SOW with gray area. In the scenario described above, the agency is way too late for a scope change conversation. All they can do now is to humbly appeal to your mercy.

Here are a few recommendations to beat scope creep:

  1. We know you are under budget pressure. So require a budget conversation at the end of each milestone to mitigate surprises at the end.
  2. Don’t assume no news is good news. Be on the lookout for anything that might depart from the scope and bring it up with your agency if they don’t bring it up with you.
  3. When the agency does have the courage to broach the subject of scope creep, don’t be dismissive. We’re trying to prevent a train wreck.
  4. Include a 10-15% contingency in your internal budgets for situations like this.
  5. Keep an open mind (and a little grace) when situations like the above occur. We usually know we blew it and are willing to take part of the hit. But scope creep is inevitable in some projects. We’ll do our best to bring it up early if you will be open to having the conversation with us.

*Forbes Study

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Don Low is a Principal at Push. When he’s not working, he’s turning laps in a pool, riding his road bike, rooting his kids on or deciding what to make for dinner.

 

 

Inside/Out: It Costs How Much?

Your Agency: Inside/Out 

Everything your agency wants you to know but won’t tell you because they don’t want you to fire them. 

A Forbes study shows that only 41% of all marketing clients have a positive view of their agencies.  Only 38% report they are satisfied with their agencies.  But it doesn’t have to work this way.

Here at Push, we’d like to present a series of articles to help clients better understand and work with their agency. You’re welcome.

Now the fourth in our eight part installment…

———–

It costs how much? (Part 1 of 2)

There is probably no topic that is approached with as much trepidation by both client and agency as “The budget”. The collapse of our economy in 2008 ushered in a very different way agencies and clients talk about money. It’s essentially a modified version of Abbot & Costello’s “Who’s on First?”

Client: “How much do you think this is going to cost?”

Agency: “What’s your budget?”

Client: “I don’t have a budget. I need you to tell me how much it’s going to cost?”

Agency: “Well…ballpark, how much money do you have?”

Client: “None right now. This is incremental to our FY 15 budget. You have to tell me.”

Agency: “It depends on what you think you need.”

Client: “But I need you to give me an idea of what I can get before I can get budget.”

Agency: “We need to know more about the deliverables before we can give you a recommendation.”

Client: “But you have to help me better define what the deliverables will be.”

Agency: “Well, that depends on how much money you have.”

Client: “I don’t know how much money I have.”

Agency: “Then how can we tell you what it’s going to cost?”

This breakdown happens because both sides are unwilling to be transparent. The client is afraid they’re going to be overcharged. Wallowing_in_CashThe agency is afraid they’re going to lose their shirt. Your agency should be a strategic partner and work with you to help you define your projects and determine budget parameters. But too often clients and agencies don’t approach ill-defined projects as partners. They hold their cards close to their vest and “Who’s On First”ensues.

Do you really want to know how most agencies estimate projects? It’s not an exact science, unfortunately.  An agency’s budgets are usually created based on the following questions:

  1. Does the client have an established budget?
  2. Have we ever done a similar project?
  3. Were we over or under budget on those projects?
  4. Is this client more high maintenance than the others (delays, changes, noodling, scope creep, senior managers interfering at the last minute)?
  5. Is the project interesting?
  6. Is the client an advocate for us?
  7. Is there potential to do a lot more work with this client?
  8. Do we actually want to do more work with this client?
  9. Is it something we could put in our portfolio?
  10. How much work is in the shop this month?

Not great. But it’s the truth. Most agencies are time-based businesses. We report time against projects. And our years of experience can usually get us in the ballpark when it comes to creating a budget.

If you have a general idea of what you want to have done and are willing to work with us, we can find ways to orchestrate a project to meet your pain threshold. We can often limit the number of concepts we present or find efficiencies in production. We’re even willing to take a bit of the risk.

Some of the most interesting projects are the least defined at the beginning. They take twists and turns and are difficult to scope. If you’re willing to be flexible, we can get you a budget that is in the ballpark.

Sometimes things go sideways in the process. And that often leads to the thing every client and agency dread: scope…creep. We’ll discuss that in our next article.

 

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Don Low is a principal at Push. When he’s not working, he’s turning laps in a pool, riding his road bike, rooting his kids on or deciding what to make for dinner.

 

Inside/Out: Training Your Agency

Your Agency: Inside/Out 

Everything your agency wants you to know but won’t tell you because they don’t want you to fire them. 

A Forbes study shows that only 41% of all marketing clients have a positive view of their agencies.  Only 38% report they are satisfied with their agencies.  But it doesn’t have to work this way.

Here at Push, we’d like to present a series of articles to help clients better understand and work with their agency. You’re welcome.

Now the third in our eight part installment…

——–

Training Your Agency…

Place: Washington Athletic Club, Seattle, WA

Event: AdClub luncheon

Panel: Three Seattle marketers

Theme: “How Clients Think”

As the panel wrapped up, the moderator asked one final, insightful question, “What’s the one thing you wish your agency knew about you?”

Michelle McEttrick, then Marketing Director at Safeco and eventually CMO at Barclays, provided an insight that changed the way we do business, “My agency needs to know that I only think about them 4% of my day, max”.

You could have heard a pin drop. What? Here we are living for you – bugs-bunny-tumblrcreative brainstorming, internal strategizing, prodigious notes, concepting, production schedules, copy proofs, late nights, weekends – and you barely even think about us during the day?

Anyone on the client side would exclaim, “Yes, it’s TRUE!” You sit in meetings all day, talking about everything BUT the next creative campaign or website design. No wonder you don’t return our calls, respond to our e-mails until nightfall, provide the feedback we need, or process our invoices on time!

Let’s look at it another way. One of our Microsoft clients said it very succinctly.  “It’s not my job to manage the agency. It’s the agency’s job to manage me” (Expletives deleted for the sake of the children). If agencies truly understood how busy our clients are, we would manage the work…and our clients differently.

Here are a few suggestions to help you train your agency:

  1. Ask your agency to batch their questions to you. The last thing you need is a string of individual email requests and questions filling your inbox. Ask your agency to be organized enough to create an itemized bullet list of what they need from you. Then reward them with inline answers to that email.
  2. Ask your agency to produce a Friday report. The Friday Recap Report should include what they accomplished for you this week, what they’re going to do for you next week, any open issues that require your attention and budget and schedule updates for each of your projects.
  3. When you have multiple projects in the works, set aside time to talk daily with your agency. Even if it’s a 15 minute call. Ask them to be organized and have an agenda ready to go.
  4. Like a rat in a Skinner box, a little reward goes a long way. Keep your commitments and respond in a timely manner. It’s likely your projects are not moving forward without your critical feedback.
  5. Set aside time to meet in-person once in a while. Especially for creative presentations. Agencies are relational. Working remotely is fine most of the time, but there’s nothing like a face-to-face conversation to keep positive momentum.

Working with your agency should be the best part of your day. We’ll remember you have a lot on your plate if you remember we’re here, burning the late night oil, working to make you a hero with your boss, colleagues and customers.

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Don Low is a principal at Push. When he’s not working, he’s turning laps in a pool, riding his road bike, rooting his kids on or deciding what to make for dinner.

 

Your Agency: Inside/Out Getting the Best Creative From Your Agency

Your Agency: Inside/Out 

Everything your agency wants you to know but won’t tell you because they don’t want you to fire them. 

A Forbes study shows that only 41% of all marketing clients have a positive view of their agencies.  Only 38% report they are satisfied with their agencies.  But it doesn’t have to work this way.

Here at Push, we’d like to present a series of articles to help clients better understand and work with their agency. You’re welcome.

Now the second in our 8 part installment…

——–

Getting the Best Creative From Your Agency

 If the strategy isn’t creative, the creative won’t be strategic.

Every agency has experienced it at least once. You presented the new concepts to a sea of client poker faces. At the end the presentation your client nervously said, “Thank you” and “We’ll be getting back to you.”

Then comes the dreaded you-missed-the-mark call. “It’s like you guys didn’t even read the brief. I outlined exactly who the audience was, objectives, desired outcomes…everything. Why didn’t the concepts reflect it?”

Droopy_dogInspired ideas usually start with inspired creative briefs. Great work is the result of a well-constructed creative strategy. It’s not just the creative director’s job to provide the inspiration. It’s also your job, as the client, to think creatively about the underlying marketing strategy and how it might be conveyed.

When creative misses the mark, it’s usually because there hasn’t been enough work put into writing an effective, inspirational brief. Simply saying a product is “best-in-class” or “revolutionary” doesn’t provide the creative fodder needed for good work. So, be a part of a creative brief process that answers the following questions:

1. What’s the problem? (need)

What needs does your product solve? What is your customer’s pain? Describe it to the nth degree and be clear with your agency.

2. Who has the problem? (audience)

How is the customer solving it now? How else might they solve it? What’s keeping them up at night? You must understand what your customers are doing now and what their other options might be.

3. What’s the root of the problem ? (understanding)

Customers are willing to consider you, only after you’ve demonstrated you understand their problem. And sometimes you have to dig deeply to understand the real issues.

4. What are we selling? (value proposition)

While this might seem to be a given, most of our clients struggle with a succinct way to explain how their product solves the customers’ problem. Be very specific.

5. How do we connect to emotion? (impact)

Why should they care? Customers buy for both rational and emotional reasons. Let’s brainstorm about what we can do to appeal to their intellect AND to their heart.

6. What will we say and how will we say it? (messaging)

Create a messaging matrix with key messages, reasons to believe, foundational concept pillars and organizing ideas that will grab your customers’ attention.

7. Now that we’ve got them, what do we want them to do? (CTA)

Whether you’re promoting a white paper or running a Super Bowl ad, it’s important to think through the conversion funnel and how your efforts are going to drive sales. The biggest reason the average tenure of a CMO is two years is the lack of ROI for the money spent. It starts with making sure nothing is done without knowing how your efforts are going to convert.

8. What are the requirements of the project? (givens)

Examples: tagline, logo, images, timeline, budget, approval process, stakeholders.

It’s the agency’s job to write the creative brief. But as a client, take responsibility for inspiring your creative team to do their best work. Here are eight things you, as a client, can do to better ensure the creative will be on target:

  1. Be clear about your value proposition – Articulate what it is you’re selling and why it’s the kind of product your customer can’t live without. If you’re not personally engaged and enthused about the product, don’t expect your agency to be.
  2. Don’t have a pre-determined solution in your mind. Erich Fromm said, “Creativity is the courage to let go of your certainties.” Be open to any new ideas your agency may bring. It’s not the agency’s job to read your mind.
  3. And the flip side – Come up with some of those ideas yourself. Write a tagline or two; find inspiring images or creative executions from another campaign. A good idea doesn’t care where it came from. Be a contributor to the creative solution, not just the arbiter and judge. If your agency doesn’t welcome your creative thinking, get a new agency.
  4. Be comfortable in the mess. Understand that solving the creative equation is not linear.  A great creative solution uses both sides of your brain.
  5. Get face-time with your creative team. As you speak to them about your marketing challenges, their minds will click away. We never stop creating. We just can’t help it.
  6. Make sure you have the right people involved from the beginning. Your decision-makers need to be involved from the get go. Late-to-the-party perspectives are the #1 killer of great ideas. As your executives are enrolled in the process (painful as it may be) they take ownership of the final solution and are more willing to embrace it in the end.
  7.  Learn how to give feedback. If you see something that’s not right to you, bring it up. Talk about it. Identify what bothers you and why. Then let your team go back and solve it for you.  We really want to work with you to get the best final creative solution.
  8. Try to separate your own preferences from those of your audience. Focus on your customer, not your loathing of san serif type.

Finally, continue to express confidence in your creative team – in person, in e-mail, and on the phone. With an inspired brief and a lot of elbow grease we’ll figure this out together and together we’ll nail the winning concept.

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Don Low is a principal at Push. When he’s not working, he’s turning laps in a pool, riding his road bike, rooting his kids on or deciding what to make for dinner.

 

Inside/Out: Why agency relationships succeed or fail

Your agency: Inside/Out  

Everything your agency wants you to know but won’t tell you because they don’t want to get fired. 

Here at Push, we’d like to present a series of articles to help clients better understand and work with their agency.

A Forbes study shows that only 41% of all marketing clients have a positive view of their agencies.  Only 38% report they are satisfied with their agencies*.  But we don’t believe it has to work this way.

In the posts that follow, we’ll lift the lid on creative agencies. We’ll pull back the curtain. Get ready. It’s a curtain filled with passion and brilliance, hard work and… need we say it…even love.

——-

Why Agency Relationships Succeed or Fail

Pepe

John Gottman is a behavioral psychologist, heading The Love Lab at the University of Washington. In spending some time with couples (and hooking them up to every monitor you can possibly imagine) Gottman is able to predict, with over 90% accuracy, whether the relationship will make it or not.

In his book “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail”* Gottman cites what he calls “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”.  These are the stages most marriage relationships go through as they devolve.

  1. Criticism “Why do you always say things like that?”
  2. Contempt “It’s just like you to say something like that?”
  3. Defensiveness “I would never talk to you the way you talk to me. ”
  4. Stonewalling “Why even bother to talk about it anymore. You’ll never change.”

If couples are going to maintain a long and successful relationship, they need to recognize the signs of this devolution and work to circumvent the pitfalls that happen along the way.

The same holds true in many agency/client relationships. When a relationship goes sour, it starts with subtle cracks in the wall, little chinks in the armor. A missed deadline here, a little scope creep there, edits missed, giving attitude in a meeting, a poorly written creative brief, a missed request.

Has the agency become too comfortable in the relationship? Maybe. Are you, the client, not being clear? Possibly. Is there baggage on both sides? Probably. Are both parties trying to put their best foot forward? Usually.

Like Gottman’s Four Horsemen, we’d like to suggest there are often four stages in the devolution of a client/agency relationship as well.

  1. Education “There are just things you need to understand about us.”
  2. Frustration “Where did that budget come from?”
  3. Sarcasm “You’re not sending me a bill for THAT, are you?”
  4. Avoidance “We can probably just handle this internally.”

But it doesn’t have to work this way.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll publish a series of posts that will shine the light on how agencies work. We call it our “Inside/Out” series. By better understanding what happens behind-the-scenes, you’ll glean helpful hints for getting your agency relationship back on the track and moving ahead at full steam.

*Forbes Study

*Why Marriages Succeed or Fail

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Don Low is a principal at Push. When he’s not working, he’s turning laps in a pool, riding his road bike, rooting his kids on or deciding what to make for dinner.