Which is better, good pitch process or just good process?

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Richard Butler

ISBA and the IPA have just launched a new joint initiative.

It’s a web site about how to run good pitches and you can find it at www.thegoodpitch.com

As a guide to pitch good practice and responsible behaviour it is a highly instructive and indeed laudable exercise.

The video clips on the web site are informative and give a clear indication not only of recommended positive behaviours but also an insight into the high levels of frustration and cost incurred if good practice and process is ignored.

But for me, only one of the many advertising and marketing great and good featured on the site actually gets to the nub of the issue.

Stephen Woodford Chairman and CEO of DDB London suggests

‘I would do much less pitching. I would try and fix the relationship, change the team, change the talent, change every aspect of the relationship …so pitching becomes very much a last resort’

I couldn’t agree more.

In fact Stephen’s comment potentially suggests a number of equally, if not more useful ISBA/IPA initiatives.

Instead of the good pitch web site how about the ‘building a good relationship’ web site or ‘the importance of positive process’ web site or ‘how to fix a relationship without pitching’ web site.

I’m sure all of these could benefit Clients and their Agencies and help build long term mutually beneficial relationships, and importantly help avoid the inefficiencies, high costs and discontinuities that inevitably accompany a pitch process.

That is unless your view of good process is a series of well run pitches.

Of course some Clients have adopted and even benefited from this way of working.

Equally those Clients who have engaged their Agency for the long term and have focused on sorting out relationship issues rather than walking away from them or pitching because of them have, I suspect, prospered disproportionately.

A great example of the latter is Audi.

To my knowledge they last pitched the business in the early 1980’s, and having appointed BBH have been in partnership with them ever since.

Vorsprung durch technik as they say…. Or perhaps it should be Vorsprung durch arbeitsgang (process)

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Pitches aren’t good for business

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Richard Butler

I read an article in Campaign recently where one of the ‘pitch doctor’s was delighted to report that business was continuing to improve.

In essence they were celebrating the fact that an increasing number of Clients were so dissatisfied with their agency that they were prepared to suffer the business disruption, message discontinuities and significant costs that inevitably surround a pitch.

It seems to me that this is the equivalent of a divorce lawyer celebrating an increase in the number of divorces.

Well it’s good for their business even if it’s a potential calamity for society as a whole.

I found myself asking a couple of rather disturbing questions.

Is the Agency Client relationship doomed to be transient?

Or is there something inherent in the nature of the marcomms business that means we are for ever trapped in a cycle of pitch and pitch again?

In a business which is now trumpeting the virtues of consumer engagement and relationship management it seems a cruel irony that its own relationships are so fragile and temporal.

Some blame the fast turnover of CMO’s and the knee jerk reaction to call a pitch as part of the new incumbent making his mark.

Others feel it is all a consequence of the febrile atmosphere which surrounds the death throes of the old Agency model and the lack of any real sense of anew direction.

Or perhaps it’s simply a function of an over supplied Agency market desperate to woo any business at any price.

What is certain is that whilst the vicious cycle of pitching continues marketing will remain in the words of Market Leader magazine (Quarter 1 2010) ‘the least efficient process in business today.’

If and until, as Market Leader suggests, the process of creating marcomms is ‘simplified and streamlined’, inefficiency seems to be the unwanted guest at the table.

What is clear is that unless consistent attention is given to the way a Client and their Agency engage there is little possibility of creating clear and consistent engagement between the Client and the consumers.

We will revert to the old interruption model….

…. this is our message to you until it is interrupted by a pitch and then you’ll be interrupted by somebody else’s message

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Consumer insight – a global perspective

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Chris Baker

The LinkedIn Consumer Insight Interest Group has been running a thread inviting members to define insight in one word. It’s a global group and so a global perspective.

Together people’s contributions paint quite an insightful picture of the insight ‘brand’…. here’s the word cloud… enjoy.

Posted in consumer insight | Tagged , | Leave a comment

THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING HOW TO KEEP SCORE

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Richard Butler

Rory Sutherland of IPA and Ogilvy fame writes a very good fortnightly piece in The Spectator.

Recently he argued that our fascination with some sports is, in part, fuelled by they way their scoring system works.

Take tennis for example, if a Murray v Nadal match was scored in games, 28-26 doesn’t really hint at the tense 5 set thriller it actually was.

Equally I’m sure that the byzantine scoring system in cricket is part of its statto centric appeal.

Chris Baker my business partner is a golfer and has tried and failed on a number of occasions to explain to me why being under par is a good thing.

Rory’s article made me think that it’s not just the scores but the way you keep score that is important.

Perhaps part of the reason that we see so much silo thinking in organisations is that they have department centric measures of what a success looks like and departmental teams will often have remuneration packages based on that success and not a measure which relates to the achievement of goals for the whole Co.

So Logistics may find themselves keeping score in an entirely different way from Marketing who are just as likely to have a different scoring system to IT.

You would of course assume that Sales and Marketing would keep score in the same way but I knew of one major organisation where this was very definitely not the case!

Which brings me to the rather different scoring systems that Agencies and Clients measure themselves by

Think American football and snooker and you might just have a sense of the gulf.

Contrast the Agency worlds obsession with creative awards, new business wins and star hirings, with the Client world of sales, customer loyalty, brand image and share price.

You can be sure and certain that very few bonus packages for the Agency account team will based on their Clients sales and the Marketing Director will rarely be rewarded for winning a yellow pencil at D&AD.

Of course one can argue that the Agency doesn’t have direct control over sales and the CMO can’t write the ads but that just means we should be creative about finding a scoring system that counts the win wins for both teams

Perhaps this is why the commonest vent we hear from Clients is that ‘the Agency doesn’t understand my business.’

In reality is it that the Agency doesn’t understand the way my business keeps score and within that how the Board scores me?

I don’t for a moment think that the worlds of magic and logic will or should ever be scored in exactly the same way

But it is arguable that to get past first base in drawing up a common agenda, which is in turn the corner stone of positive Client Agency engagement, it’s more than a good idea to understand what success looks like for both parties and to adopt a scoring system which reflects the similarities and differences.

Posted in marketing communications process | Tagged , | Leave a comment

ADVERTISING AGENCIES NEED TO GET ENGAGED NOT RELY ON RELATIONSHIPS

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Richard Butler

I went to a lecture the other day given by a very clever man called
Grant Leboff.

He’s written a new book called Sticky Marketing which amongst many fascinating insights, argues that a focus on the relationship between supplier and customer is outmoded and to ensure any kind of relationship durability, brands need to offer customer engagement.

He argues that sales based relationships are essentially transactional and are therefore competitively vulnerable. Any customer offered better for less by a new supplier would be negligent not to consider moving their business.

Engagement as it suggests is based on delivering significant incremental offerings which the customer will value.

As an example we can consider Dorset Cereals a brand that has grown six fold in as many years in an apparently mature, price sensitive market controlled by big players.

Of course the product is sensational but so was the original whose sales were stuck at £5m.

Sensational growth has been delivered by offering innovative packaging, and a web based customer interface which enables added value promotions (from wellies for Glastonbury to VW camper vans) and regular highly responsive customer dialogue

Relationship would have been just about selling a good product.

Engagement has been all about the added value that an honest tasty and real product could bring to its customers without a penny spent on advertising.

Check out their site at http://www.dorsetcereals.co.uk/ and send a life’s too short postcard to a friend!

It also struck me that Grant Leboffs ideas were hugely relevant to the Client Agency interface.

Agencies always focus on satisfaction with the relationship, and in doing so they focus on transactions.

There is no doubt they are important but given the abundance of qualified competition and highly informed customers, unless your transactional offer is unique you are competitively vulnerable.

Of course some relationships are deepened by personal interaction, and when this is the case it’s important to ensure that skilled and personable staff manage these interactions effectively

BUT the mistake most Agencies make is to assume that personal relationships provide reliable insulation for inadequate delivery.

The fact is that Clients fire Agencies for failing to deliver excellence in the transaction, often sacrificing good personal relationships as a consequence

As W.H. Auden put it

Almost all of our relationships begin, and most of them continue as a form of mental and physical barter… to be terminated when one or both parties run out of the goods

Leboff argues that it is customer engagement and not relationship we need to create, value and measure.

Time spent understanding what a specific Client will value and then focussing strategic effort towards high quality added value delivery of it is the essence of engagement.

Or as Auden puts it, it will only be a matter of time before you ‘run out of the goods’ and the relationship is terminated!

Posted in marketing communications process | Tagged | Leave a comment

HOW DO YOU DELIVER CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT?

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Richard Butler

It’s the challenge confronting most successful mature businesses.

It’s also the challenge confronting many procurement professionals for whom the easier wins of the past have been replaced by the need to show continued sustainable progress in value delivery.

The answer may lay in the ‘aggregation of marginal gains.’

I first heard this phrase being used by Dave Brailsford, Performance Director of Team GB Cycling.

His theory recognises that doing one thing better and making a 10% improvement is probably not achievable when you are already performing at the highest level. As a result his objective is to improve the team performance by 1% over a whole spectrum of racing… and then aggregate those 1 per cents to create a winning margin.

Perhaps we should review our performance in a similar way. Stop looking for the big, simple and probably unsustainable wins and start getting inside the supplier and work with them to help find a collection of small wins that can deliver potentially mutually beneficial value. In our experience a series of process improvements and refinements, positive process, will always deliver value gains

Looking for a series of marginal gains as part of your regular marketing health check, and not the big quick win might help to avoid the recent debacles in deals done with media buying houses where margins have been shaved to a degree that results in a lose/lose, for both Client and Agency.

The aggregation of marginal gains theory also suggests that wins will not be delivered over night. Identifying the areas for marginal gain will require thought expertise and testing.

Not all of them will deliver the expected return but the value will be in their aggregation.

Perhaps the old adage of ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’ was an early expression of the theory.

Posted in marketing communications process | Tagged | Leave a comment

MAKING INSIGHT USEFUL

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Chris Baker

Insights drive business. If they don’t they’re not useful, and not ‘Insight’.

All too often ‘Insight’ is just a rebranding of the Research Department or a way of glorifying any half-interesting observation about consumers, a brand, a marketplace or the world in general. But Insight is too valuable and fundamental to commercial success to be treated so casually – because at the heart of any successful business, brand or communications campaign you’ll find a powerful insight, usually emotional, while failures can usually be tracked back to an absence or weakness of Insight.

Insight has variously been defined as ‘a penetrating understanding of consumers’ ‘an undiscovered truth’ or ‘something that makes you go ‘AHA!’. There are also aphorisms like “Great insight is like a fridge – when you open it, the light comes out”.

These are OK as far as they go but fail to capture the critical element of a what a great insight needs to do – and that is to drive action, mobilise people (both consumers and those delivering it), in a way that result in commercial ROI (Return On Insight).

Starting by keeping it simple, my favourite shorthand definition is that Insight is ‘a useful truth’ – useful because it’s true (always a good start!), useful because it creates a powerful response in people (whether ‘AHA’ – a word unfortunately rendered risible to many of us by Alan Partridge – or simply ‘these people really understand me and what I need’), and useful because it provides energy and focus to a broader strategy and commercial implementation plan.

Insights happen when people understand what the knowledge means for them, and how it can take them (and their organisations) forward. It’s only then that information or observation becomes Insight. (You know you’re there when nobody asks the ‘so what?’ question.) Allied to this Insight always needs an element of Foresight too!

So there needs to be a commercial, not just a consumer, context in both the generation of potential Insights and the ‘qualification’ of them. For instance Nestle use what they call the “4 R´s” test. – the Insight should be Real (ie. deep truth), Relevant (to your brand or business), should Resonate (strikes a chord with your target audience) and, last but not least, provoke a Reaction (ie.is powerful enough to attract consumers and change their behaviour).

If you want to describe an idea convincingly to someone you need to set the stage. 

That’s where insights come in. Look for the aspiration of the people you want to benefit from the idea, the current situation (what they are doing now to fulfill their aspiration) and the gap between these two. These are the basic three elements of any Insight. Once you get it right, it will evoke the ‘wow, yes you really understand me’ response, and it’s easy sailing from there.

This can sound a little dry and analytical so it’s important to remember that to galvanise action Insight has to be Emotional (the precondition for any action).

While Insight can come from anywhere, Emotion is a great way in. Ask ‘what’s the obvious emotional truth that your brand is based on? Building on that ‘what’s the obvious emotional truth that’s going to …grow the brand…grow the business …make you more profitable …strengthen the franchise …make customers/employees/stakeholders happier’?….and so on.

If you can’t define the business you’re in terms of an emotional truth or benefit (and organise it around brilliantly delivering this), then your future most definitely won’t be bright.

Posted in brand strategy | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

TO DECOUPLE OR NOT?

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Richard Butler

Should I decouple is the question on many Client’s minds at the moment. Perhaps an illuminating way of considering the issue is to ask why any Client in 2011 would think of ‘coupling’

Full service was undoubtedly the answer in the days of telex, typewriters and travelling to do business. Then it was a necessity to have an ‘Agency in every port’ to facilitate the re-expression of your global campaign.

Today if you are looking for state of the art technology aligned with creative production expertise you are often more likely to find it outside the confines of the full service agency.

There are now a plethora of low overhead, lean processed offers available which mean that it’s not just the basic elements of adaptation and versioning that are best served by decoupling

A savvy client can now find excelling solutions to profitable decoupling further up the value chain whilst maintaining or even enhancing executional quality.

So perhaps the question to ask yourself is do I want the 21st century answer to delivery or the mad men solution?

Posted in marketing communications process | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

WHO NEEDS AN AGENCY?

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Chris Baker

Increasingly advertisers are assessing the benefits of taking their creative business in-house – most fashion houses do it, media businesses like Sky and the BBC do it for much of their output, Specsavers have done it with some success for many years, now Jaguar is doing it globally.

De-coupled multi-channel production delivery, new technology solutions, high availability of ‘virtual talent’, and evolving marketing skill sets mean that ‘becoming your own agency’ is a very real option for more advertisers. The potential benefits are major – leaner processes, speed to market, creative control and enhanced ability to deliver a total brand experience, cost transparency and (if you get it right) cost reductions.

There are certain preconditions for success. You’ll need a creative director in-house (and arguably a strong ‘creative culture’ in the broader business), you’ll need the scale to support and fully occupy the specialist skill sets you may need to add, you’ll need communications-savvy project managers to make it all happen. Plus an appetite for accountability – where the bucks stops instantly becomes very clear!

So it’s not an option for everybody – it’s an easier move for companies already with in-house creative directors and a strong creative culture (such as fashion houses), companies with high volumes and short timescales (like the TV companies), and companies with a focused product range (easier for a Jaguar than say a Toyota).

If you’re thinking about it, watch out – the benefits are generally more apparent than the costs, but managing delivery is much harder and more important than you might think, and there are many stops on the journey of decoupling before the final destination of taking creative in-house.


Posted in marketing communications process | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment