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November 16, 2005
What's Wrong with the Agency/Client Relationship?
The recent Salz Survey of Advertiser-Agency Relations (conducted annually since 1986) indicates troubling rifts between those who make ads, and those who buy them to sell their products and services. 35 percent of respondents claim "more hassles" in their relationships. At the same time, 41 percent of advertisers and 46 percent of agencies point toward "more tension." The trend continues across multiple measures, with several major indicators down, and some at the lowest ebb since the survey began.
On the surface, it looks bad. But digging down, we suspect that the tension is around performance. How well is this stuff working? Creativity, after all, is wonderful... as long as you're defensibly building brand or selling product. We found a similar tension inside financial service corporations in a recent survey conducted by MCorp., with the value of marketing and branding as difficult to quantify for marketers as ever... and demands from executives for internal accountability growing.
If agencies took a step back and looked at the client (and performance) centric service delivery model adopted by the management consulting world, they may find their relationships looking a little rosier next year. As discussed by Ethan M. Rasiel in his book The McKinsey Way, the hierarchy is pretty clear. The Client. The Firm. Then You. Ad and marketing agencies need to ditch the creative "prima-donna" attitude and take ownership of their roles as business partners whose existence is justified only so long as they are effectively increasing sales, income and profit.
Comments (0) | Posted by MCorp. at 4:00 PM | Permalink
November 14, 2005
5 Steps to Building a Strong Brand
We know how hard this is. The idea of a “strong brand” and all that it implies is the Holy Grail of the customer relationship for many companies. In a recent presentation a “C” level exec really didn’t want the long version; “Summarize it,” he said. Luckily this was in my back pocket…
Step 1: Assessment
Understand your internal and external brand perceptions and your customers relationships with your brand. Identify perceptual “gaps.” Understand and prioritize “important” vs. “believable” attributes for your brand, and profile your competition.
Step 2: Strategy
Prioritize those values and attributes that drive audience perceptions and communicate key differentiators and benefits.
Step 3: Architecture
Brand architecture needs to communicate brand and messaging priorities through product and service lines, customer segments, divisional and/or subsidiary relationships, and distribution channels.
Step 4: Application
Be relentlessly consistent with communicating what your brand is, and delivering it across all internal and external channels with all Touchpoints, through all communications and interactions.
Step 5: Monitoring
Brands must be monitored to ensure that they retain relevance with key audiences; explicit responsibility for custodianship and periodic brand audits and tracking studies provide ongoing market-driven feedback.
Comments (1) | Posted by MCorp. at 4:15 PM | Permalink
November 11, 2005
A Branding Touchpoint Primer: Everything Matters
Organizations touch their audiences in many ways, across multiple "Touchpoints." These Touchpoints are all of the physical, communication and human interactions that your company's customers experience over their relationship with your company. Here's the thing that many organization's seem to have trouble grasping: every Touchpoint is a brand statement.
In brief, this means that Brand attributes - both positive and negative - are communicated at every Touchpoint, including things such as your VRU, customer service interactions, advertising, billing statements, marketing communications, online experiences and virtually every other point of contact. Lessons learned? In brief, everything matters. So be consistent in what you say, how you say it, and how it looks. And always keep your customers point-of-view in mind. Pretty straightforward, in theory. It's the doing that can trip you up...
Comments (2) | Posted by MCorp. at 4:09 PM | Permalink