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Rapier
One senior
marketer has recently described media-neutral planning as, "The Holy Grail"
of marketing. We will argue that it is simply an important hygiene factor
in modern marketing practice.
We believe
that the current concentration on media-neutrality is a misguided distraction
for both clients and agencies. It doesn't solve the fundamental marketing
issues of today. The traditional approach to marketing is seriously broken
and marketing directors and agencies need to make radical changes, fast.
It's our
belief that Service Brands need a new approach most urgently.
If you
work closely with any leading service brand this may sound familiar:
· Your brand
awareness figures look ok but your saliency is poor.
·
You need to continue to sell your core product but you wish to start
selling new products.
· You have increasing sales targets to meet from each of your individual
business units.
· Your core revenue streams are sustained by saturating your customer
base with the same hard sell direct mail you have been using for years
but it's not getting the response rates it used to and research tells
you customers are fed up with it.
· You've had both your acquisition targets and retention targets increased.
· You've been told that the city thinks your average customer value
looks miserably low and they're just about to work out that you have
a whole bunch of customers who actually lose you money.
In our
experience this is a pretty typical scenario for service brand marketing
directors. However, both clients and agencies are looking to address these
seemingly conflicting issues and objectives through media-neutrality.
It can't be done, and the vain attempts to do it are resulting in heightened
stress and tension within and between clients and agencies. To find the
solution the debate needs to be moved up a level.
Three things
that have changed for ever - first, is the proliferation and fragmentation
of all media and points of contact between brand and consumer, second,
businesses have changed from having clear and narrow offers to far more
complex multi product/service offers in an increasingly competitive environment,
and third, consumers have become far more savvy and marketing literate
and rightly expect a lot more.
A changing
world requires new skills
Marketing strategy today is the art (and science) of managing the complex
interface between a business and its consumers. For those in service businesses,
marketing strategy spans way beyond traditional communications and brand
issues into more operational areas like the call centre experience. Marketing
directors also need a much more sophisticated understanding of all the
profit drivers of their business. Success is no longer simply a matter
of hitting brand awareness or sales numbers. They now need to optimise
activities around the customers who provide greatest value. Under intense
pressure from their CEO's and FD's to deliver leaps in marketing effectiveness
and revenue, they are looking for help to cope with this tougher world.
How are
agencies responding?
Agencies are generally responding in one of three ways: Some agencies
have decided to "stick to their knitting" and remain in their traditional
comfort zones such as, producing TV advertising. Others have tried to
pull together their disparate range of media expertise into a more coherent
offering but their integration of existing silos often delivers a mediocre
result. However, a few have embarked on the painful but necessary process
of completely re-inventing the agency model to meet client's fundamental
needs. This third approach requires a dramatic change in agency focus,
skills, processes and client relationships. Becoming media-neutral is
simply one small part of the answer, indeed "solution neutrality" may
be a more helpful term to avoid getting stuck in a media-centric view
of the world.
At Rapier
we've spent the last five years undergoing this painful transition, and
we've learned some important lessons.
Real business
understanding needs to be at the core of the agency
We've often found that the most valuable help we can give clients doesn't
result in delivering advertising but might, for example, improve the customer
experience in call centres or the sales approach of the door to door sales
team. Indeed, recommending a new communications campaign as a solution
to any marketing issue, will often worsen the situation by widening the
gulf between the marketing promise and the customer reality.
Agencies
therefore need to hire new kinds of people. People who genuinely understand
the wider business context (and the needs of the shareholders), but who
also understand how this can be best aligned with consumers' needs and
desires. From our experience, this means hiring people from outside the
traditional agency world, and investing heavily in cross-fertilising the
best practices from different areas of expertise: including strategists
from the consulting world, dataplanners from data specialists, ex client
marketers, direct marketing, advertising and media planners.
You also
have to learn to work quite differently. Over the last few years we've
learnt that combining these multi-skilled individuals into permanent teams
creates inevitable friction - potentially unmanageable and unhelpful.
Therefore, you need to recruit people who not only bring specialist skills,
but a broader marketing interest, a willingness to learn/develop new skills
and a desire to embrace, and even drive, change. Only then will you end
up with a friction which facilitates the delivery of new and better solutions
where the team as a whole is far greater than the sum of its individual
parts.
A new business
partnership
Given the scale of the change and investment needed, agencies and clients
need to develop new business partnerships. You might ask yourself "Will
clients really have the appetite to pay for such a broader team of external
skills? - "If it's about greater business understanding, isn't that a
client role?"
Our experience
is that whilst clients are closer than agencies to understanding the problem
they are still a long way from finding the answer: real change is held
back by their size, complexity and lack of creativity.
Lets get
positive
Clients need your help more than ever: agencies are full of highly creative
people who love getting into the heads of consumers and, when they have
developed a clear brief, can deliver massive business impact through highly
creative communications. Clients need agency people involved to apply
their unique creativity and consumer understanding directly to the core
of their business on a daily basis. The additional skills (business, data
etc) the agencies need to employ are to supplement those in the client
marketing team and help them build bridges with the rest of their Business,
as well as to facilitate totally connected thinking within the Agency.
In effect,
just as Pollitt created the planner/account handler model to deal with
the marketing challenges of the 1960's, the 21st century now demands a
new agency model: one which is able to balance multiple issues in order
to deliver value-creating solutions - including media-neutral marketing
plans - for its clients.
Agencies
can now have a role in the boardroom that they have previously rarely
experienced, influencing major strategic decisions which will have huge
profit and shareholder impacts. New world marketing directors are commanding
bigger salaries, bonuses and boardroom airtime so the agencies which support
them in this journey are likely to reap similar rewards.
(c) Account
Planning Group 1995-2002
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