How exploring your ways of working can be more impactful than going to pitch
As a leading intermediary, we regularly hear the lament from brand side marketers that their agency isn’t performing. If the wheels have fallen off your marketing plan and your KPIs are looking sadder than July’s weather forecast, it’s often your agency(ies) that bears the brunt of the frustration. However, going to pitch and changing agencies isn’t always the best approach.
We start every project with a period of discovery to determine where the obstacles to marketing performance lie. It can be easy to point at your agency but often the signs indicate there are smarter strategies for achieving marketing nirvana. This is where our transformation team comes in, examining, reorganising and optimising your ways of working, or WoW for short.
What do we mean by Ways of Working?
In simple terms, it’s how you get marketing done. That sounds a bit simplistic and, sometimes, it is. We’ve helped clients learn how to run meetings or brief an agency properly. Other times, it’s rather more complex.
I’ll share two examples of recent WoW projects when our clients faced rather more challenging issues, and when we’ve been able to make a bigger contribution to what and how they’re building their brands.
1. House of brands needing to invest in creative excellence
Much has been written around the value of creativity for driving marketing effectiveness. It’s hard to argue with the data especially when it shows that creative excellence delivers a 12x profitability multiplier from advertising, chapeau Paul Dyson (2023).
This is quite the carrot for a house of brands that recognises its creative output is largely ‘features and benefits’ short-term sales focused, versus the more long-term brand building objectives that allow creative muscles to be flexed.
If your whole organisation is focused on short-term sales driven advertising, it’s not as simple as changing the objective on your creative brief to start building brand equity. A switch in approach like this needs large scale changes in culture and process, and this is where our transformation team stepped in.
Firstly, probing, testing and examining where there are opportunities for change. We looked at everything from building strategic growth audiences, to understanding and using insight, how and when to engage and brief an agency, the evolution of campaigns from big idea to execution, optimisation of live work in market, steps for continuous learning, and so on. By examining the detail and understanding the business, we were able to define a new “best in class” process for delivering creative excellence through their marketing organisation.
Reinventing these ways of working is the start of a marketing transformation for this organisation; a big shift from short-term thinking to long-term brand equity building. This also requires a cultural shift, which is essential for fostering a stronger, more collaborative partnership with their agencies; one built on alignment around a shared goal and the business building impact of great creativity.
2. Retailer needing to get its agencies delivering together
In the complex modern world of marketing, most brands have multiple agencies working together to deliver campaigns. In many cases, they play nicely with each other, holding hands as they dance together in perfect harmony towards achieving a common goal – the brand’s marketing objectives.
Now that’s a lovely picture. But, let me drop in a pinch of reality here by suggesting agencies don’t always dance to the same beat. Whether or not they are in the same holding company structure, or they are “fiercely independent” (what does that mean by the way?), they all have revenue and business growth targets to hit, and these may trump the needs of your brand.
Our retailer client works with three market leading agencies across creative, media and comms, but didn’t feel confident they were getting the best out of the team. Enter stage left our ways of working transformation team.
We examined how the brand team was engaging, briefing and managing their agencies, and we found a culture more akin to competition than collaboration. The impact was sub-optimal marketing results, or creative output that often felt more middle of the road than summiting Everest.
To fix this, we defined a clear model for how the agencies should collaborate, identifying a new lead agency to spearhead campaigns supported by a clearer process to get from business objective to big idea, pre-testing to optimisation and, ultimately, Cannes Lions worthy work.
Only time will tell on the award worthiness of the work, but the appreciation from our brand side marketing clients and the three key agencies was tangible – what an ah-ha moment.
The Impact of Focussing on WoW
The results of these two WoW transformations will be evident in years to come as the new processes and approaches are embedded; it takes time to shift organisational culture. But in the short-term, it has been easy to measure impact in terms of clearly refined creative processes, better engaged stakeholders, and genuinely happier agencies that are comfortable knowing the rules of engagement.
That’s what we mean by Ways of Working
Yes, we train teams in functional skills, but equally we look under the hood to optimise a brand’s marketing organisation, with the right tools and templates, properly defined roles and responsibilities, and optimised processes for delivering creative excellence.
Find out more about Ways of Working Transformation
Get in touch if you need to tune-up your marketing organisation’s ways of working. We’ll be happy to get our hands dirty digging into the blockers of marketing performance and defining how you can Cha Cha Cha your way to Cannes next year.