By Lucy
Davison, managing director, Keen as Mustard Marketing
Every marketing services company worth its salt
spends time advising clients to be distinctive, to create ‘unique’ brands that
stand out from the crowd and to be single-minded about their brand
promise. How strange it is that so many
of these same companies find it really hard to play the differentiation game
themselves.
As a marketing and brand consultant I have come across
this problem in advertising, in brand design, in media and in market research. It brings to mind George Bernard Shaw in Man
and Superman “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches”.
Janet
Hill, consultant marketing director at the IPA agrees. “Agencies start by
trying to differentiate on what they do – but this is not nearly enough. As the market evolves they have to add
services to the list and they end up doing everything”. This ‘laundry list’
approach is one that crops up a lot in research with agencies typically giving longwinded
inventories of services they provide and markets they work in on communications
materials. Brian Tarran, news editor
of Research Magazine says “when I first encountered the market research
industry five years ago the messages were all about how big a company was, how
many offices it had, how many staff….” And according to John Mathers, chairman
of the Design Business Association, “there is a multitude of small five man
bands in design that still think like craft based-businesses without clear
positionings or even, according to a recent Design Council survey, any written
business plans”.
Of course the situation is
not universal – different areas of marketing services differ greatly and some
are better than others.
As Janet Hill says, “traditionally
the ad agencies have relied on creative awards and talked about the work they
do so you link the agency name with the client and the campaign – AMV for the
Guinness ad with the white horses for example. But this approach means the
agency has to keep adding strings because they cannot work with more than one
client in each market and be known for it.
So they have to add a new client in a different market each time - and become
generalists”.
According to Brian Tarran the leading research agencies have now woken
up to differentiation but gone about it the wrong way. “Now they all have a
nice logo and great strap lines but there’s no substance behind it – there’s still
some way to go before they become true brands”.
In research it is the smaller, boutique agencies who have a unified or
shared philosophy who stand for something. A lot of the bigger agencies are
pulling together several very different companies into one network and just
cannot get agreement on a single-minded positioning.
The situation is the
opposite in brand design, where John Mathers says the larger groups “are good
at consistent marketing and spend as much time as clients naval gazing about it”.
But according to John this only applies to the “top 2% of branding companies”,
which leaves a large amount of ‘me-too’ agencies out there.
It is my belief that successful
companies have cracked this problem by focusing on what they believe in or how
they behave as an agency as opposed to what services they provide or which
clients they work for. As Janet Hill points out “the really interesting area is
when you get agencies that differentiate on ‘what we stand for’. This is what
the IPA has been trying to do with its Logic and Magic programmes, where
agencies are encouraged to think about what they do best and how they do it so
that they can build on that to create differentiation”.
Whether in advertising,
media, research or design, those agencies that have enjoyed the most consistent
success have powerful intellectual content – they have developed models, tools,
structures and processes that demonstrate and articulate their beliefs. In making clear statements of these ideas,
they not only position and differentiate themselves, they also create a culture
that attracts like-minded employees and clients.
A good example of how it
has been done well according to Janet Hill is Anomaly in the US which calls
itself a ‘new model agency’ and which was set up with a totally different remuneration
structure to the normal ad agency. They work on the basis of a share in profits
in true partnership with clients. The agency launched with these principles at
its core and is sticking by them.
Setting up an agency with
a clear intellectually-driven positioning is one thing, changing an existing
positioning or developing a new one is much harder. A good example of this is brand
design agency Coley Porter Bell where I worked as a consultant for several
years. CPB had led the way in talking about ‘strategic design’ but by the mid
1990’s that was not enough to create clear differentiation any more. We came up
with the idea of Visual Planning® – a visual interpretation of the client’s
brief that would serve as a benchmark throughout the project – and started
applying it to our work with clients and talking about it in the market. It was
immediately extremely successful and the agency has since gone from strength to
strength.
Other excellent examples
would be Zenith Media who are the agency known for preaching and delivering
ROI. Or BBH, who have always been known for not doing creative pitches (they
don’t give their ideas away for free – you pay for quality ergo). As Janet Hill
says, “The climate you create in which you do the work is how you differentiate.
BBH has its beliefs clearly on show in reception and uses culture as a
differentiator.”
In research good examples
are what Brian Tarran calls “the big groups of tomorrow. They have started with
principles”. For example, Creston has a clearly stated policy of ensuring that
every company they buy has bought into Creston. So they are building a network
of complementary businesses which can grow with a strong culture. And
market research and consulting group
, Cello,
is trying to model itself on ‘how not to do it’ – looking at what has been done
before in research networks and learning from mistakes.
We live in a world of
perpetual change but let’s not live by George Bernard Shaw’s adage. Let’s not
just teach our clients differentiation but let’s start living by our
faith. Tie your colours to the mast and
make a stand!