Central to any brand team’s purpose is the work it does with its external partners such as creative agencies. That work begins inside the brand team with setting strong, functional marketing objectives. I covered how to set relevant marketing objectives in the first article in this series. But then begins the agency-client partnership, the first step of which is selecting the right agency. That critical choice is the subject of this second article, which will be followed by two further articles about how to brief the agency and how to design a campaign, to complete the four-part series.
Culture clash
I often hear brand managers talk about their agencies being good or bad and, just as often, I’ll hear agencies lament or praise their clients. I take those comments with the same pinch of salt as when I hear friends talk about their spouses’ strengths and weaknesses.
I’ve been in enough relationships – commercial and otherwise – to know that most clients, most agencies and indeed most people are good enough and rarely ‘bad’. So whether a relationship sustainably succeeds or disastrously fails is less about the qualities of the individual partners and more about whether they are a good match. And, in the case of the relationship between a life sciences brand team and a creative agency, this is an especially germane metaphor.
The collision between the scientific, regulated, compliant culture of a pharma or medtech brand team and that of an imaginative, free-thinking, innovative agency is akin to a date between two people from very different socioeconomic backgrounds.
That is not to say that they can’t have a long, happy and fecund relationship. But it does mean that both parts need to take off their love-spectacles and be unromantically business-like about assessing their mutual compatibility. To do this, they should ask each other four questions.
Do our core assumptions match?
Although they are unconscious and unspoken, all organisations operate on a set of core assumptions about how the world works and what it takes to survive and thrive in that world. These world views, as they are known, come from deep in a firm’s history, often from its founders. And they exist because they helped your firm survive and get to its current successful position. So although firms talk about culture change, changing the core assumptions at the root of your culture is both difficult and often counterproductive. These assumptions are numerous, varied and powerful, because they shape our working patterns like our genes shape our faces. In the context of the brand team and agency, the critical assumptions are about the role that marketing communications plays in a brand’s success. We all sit on a spectrum from believing marketing communications to be a transformative force capable of changing the world to seeing it as a necessary but insufficient element that complements the product attributes, pricing strategies and the rest of the marketing mix. And, like a totalitarian marrying a democrat, two very different world views make for a difficult relationship. So clients should ask their potential agencies about their past successes and failures and listen for balance. Victories attributed solely to design and other creative inputs tell you that they’re at one end of the spectrum. More holistic assessments of their work as contributions to the success of a wider brand strategy tell you the opposite. And that information hints at whether you see the world the same way and therefore have the potential to work well together.
Read the article in full here.