Marketing Logic

Montagues & Capulets

4 April 2012 / Marketing Community / Charles Kirchner

Two households, both alike in dignity………….

When I embarked on what has turned out to be a slightly erratic career in marketing I had a very dim appreciation that the marketing community despite all its complexity, can be simply sub-divided into two blocks.

On one side you have the clients, who own the budgets and dispense the money.

On the other is a bewildering array of service providers mainly termed as agencies and consultancies, responsible for doing most of the work.  For unfathomable reasons, this latter group are often so entranced by their own surnames that they name their businesses accordingly.

Unusually, I have been fortunate to work on both sides of the marketing divide and even after more years than I care to admit I am still astonished more by the differences than the similarities.

Bear in mind that both clients and agency folk both occupy the same market sector, focused on broadly the same challenges and bump into each other across a career on innumerable occasions, knowing heaps of people in common.  Given this marketing village (in London at least) it is completely amazing is how little each side understands the other despite the obvious imperatives.  I have met very few agency-side types who have even the slightest notion on what a client does during the course of an average working day.  This is matched only by an equal but opposite ignorance of what happens just on the other side of the mythical fence.

Which leads to the first major disconnect.  Agencies invariably over-estimate the time and focus even their favourite client devotes to their own discipline (advertising, PR or even improving their marketing efficiency).  This leads to a mass of frustration and barely concealed primal screaming “why do they take so long in responding to our proposal, do they not remember what we agreed at our last meeting, surely they must have reserved money for our performance award?”  In a triumph of reciprocity, the client teams are equally appalled by the lack of agency breadth of view  “have they not noticed that competitor A’s launch is kicking the crap out of our share, I am about to re-interview for my own job and they are obsessing about a stand at the Cannes festival in eight month’s time”.

Unusually, I have been fortunate to work on both sides of the marketing divide and even after more years than I care to admit I am still astonished more by the differences than the similarities.

For a body of people who are supposed to occupy the upper echelons of business thought, both clients and agency can be surprisingly dense about how the other make money certainly as businesses and probably personally too.  Despite an impressive façade the reality is that agency life is financially highly insecure and the adage “two phone calls and you are out of business” is often no exaggeration.  Beneath their brittle and often over-confident exteriors agency folk have a deep awareness that few client relationships last forever and unless they are successful at attracting new business their business lives may suddenly become nasty, brutish and short.  This is in complete contrast to the stereotypical client-side marketer who probably has a sneaking suspicion that if they were to be uncannily dematerialized, the net effect, (at least in the short to medium term) would be negligible.  Agency fortunes are based almost entirely on people where clients rely on more entrenched assets such as brands and products, despite mission statement type protestations to the contrary.

I could go on but I am sure that by now you get the picture. The inescapable conclusion is that to achieve anything very worthwhile in marketing the skill is to marry the short-term, problem solving energy of the agency types with the much longer perspective of the client organizations  which is hamstrung by a well-attested inability to actually get much done within a time frame measured much less than decades.

As an example just take one of our core areas of speciality, marketing systems;  clients know that it makes blindingly good sense to collect, store and distribute their marketing stuff on a global scale and to standardize and automate difficult processes like approvals to inject much-needed speed and minimize pain and frustrations.  But mostly, left to their own devices and the ministrations of their internal  IT progress is glacial and morale low.  What we (like any good agency) are able to bring is immediate focus, after all this is our day-job, as well as project velocity and an unstoppable appetite for problem resolution before handing back a fully working solution for the client teams to run and build into their day-to-day routines.  It is the marrying of the short-term with longer strategic horizons that makes it work and as long as all the participants remember what they are actually good at it creates astonishingly effective results.