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Collaboration
Collaboration has become a popular concept in this down economy.
Firms in every specialty are acknowledging their
need for like-minded firms with complementary skill sets.
Branding and design is one critical piece in the overall marketing
of a brand or product, but it doesn’t act alone. Firms need
to step back from projects, leave their egos at the door and foster
new ways of working and communicating with other firms, even if they
are considered competitors. It’s time to grow the web, not remain
isolationist.
Clients are insisting that all of their agency partners work together more
efficiently, and design firms who continue on an adversarial path with
their advertising agency partners are at risk of losing business. At the
end of the day, the client is in charge, and agencies of all stripes, even
the monoliths, are feeling the need to adapt.
The Role of Agency Evaluation for Marketers
Marketers have a continuous need to evaluate their agency relationships,
and they require tools to help them do so as objectively as possible. These
tools, or systems, are being developed by larger consumer products companies
and will begin to trickle down to those lacking the corporate framework and
expertise in dealing with agencies.
Because marketers need to stay ahead of the curve in terms of the
latest trends and resources that impact their business, they also
need to be made aware, on a regular basis, of new resources. Agencies
of record can play their part by building on the strengths that brought
them to the client in the first place. They can successfully collaborate
with complementary (or competitive) firms. They can share their resources
with clients. They can stay abreast of the latest trends in production
and manufacturing, to help keep clients’ costs down. In addition,
they can take on the task of helping clients introduce and use new
evaluation tools.
The agency can help both clients and prospects in the early stages
of the relationship, during the bidding process. When clients are
either inexperienced or short on time, they don’t do the preparation
required to create a strong, clear brief. This causes design firms
to flounder as they struggle to understand client’s goals, while
they spend hours writing iterations of a proposal.
Design firms can circumvent these problems by providing a framework
for the brief along with key components the client must generate to
receive a proposal. A weak brief means the client is failing to do
his/her job, or the project is ill conceived. It’s better to
discover this early on and this is where the agency can be of great
help.
Design Firms Need to Stand for Something
Most design firms today tout a “proprietary process” but
the term proprietary suffers from overuse. In fact, the majority of
design firms’ mission statements sound alarmingly familiar.
Design firms should stand for something, not just specialization in a
particular design discipline. There may in fact be a truly unique process
developed by the firm, or firms may choose certain product categories as their
area of concentration.
Some firms have grouped product categories around a theme, such as
Design Force, the firm that specializes in Enjoyment Brands’.
However a firm opts to do it, it’s about being a specialist,
not a generalist.
In these days of tight budgets, marketers regard specialists as a
necessary part of the team. A firm that claims to “do it all”
will be much more difficult to integrate with the rest of the marketing
team, and harder to sell in to Management.
In addition, design firms need to be extra-cautious about whom they
hire, with so much talent available. When you hire people, you hire
their specialties, so it’s critical to be sure they contribute
to a greater whole.
Whatever a firm chooses to do, growing the business needs to be more
selective and planned, less haphazard and generic. If the answer to
the question, “Which categories or companies would you like
to do more work for” is “Anyone who will have us,”
it’s time to re-evaluate the marketing strategy.
DesignScout
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