Making brands more distinctive

I made a big mistake this month and pitched for a client with too little information. I knew as I was doing it that it was wrong, but I couldn’t help myself. It went something like this:

Read press release in trade magazine stating that Client X is looking for a new agency to move it on to pastures new (ie make more money). So I registered our interest and eagerly awaited the pitch document.

Pitch document arrives and contains basic information on the company: what service it provided, number of customers etc and that it wanted to become NO.1 in its field. Great aspirations. However, there was a note with brief that basically said “We’re not going to talk to you until after you’ve submitted your pitch, by email“. Alarm bells.

At that point I should have said to myself no, don’t touch it. Any client that wants free work without being willing to engage in a conversation just doesn’t understand the value of a good agency. But ego gets in the way. Why do I, Agency Guru and father of Brand Carrot©, need to even talk to the client?

Hah! I can solve all known marketing problems with my CIM membership card, a layout pad and a login to Getty Images. But it NEVER works like that. You can’t be successful at something by NOT being knowledgeable about it. You must have some insight, some spark and that usually comes from UNDERSTANDING YOUR CLIENT. And the brief just had too little information or insight to really get us going. In its defence the brief was four pages long. It was, however, set at 72 point.

We did the right thing in the agency – researched the market place, consumer and competitors, developed a proposition, investigated various creative routes, killed the weak ones and visualised what we thought would be the most appropriate. We worked late and delivered the pitch document ten minutes before deadline. And all the time we were working on that pitch each and every one of us had that nagging doubt that we just didn’t know enough about the client.

In fact, based on the brief, the underlying feeling was that the client didn’t know enough about itself either. And that’s the basic problem with situations like this. What “We’re not giving you any more information on our company, products, competitors, budgets, aspirations or objectives” really means is “We don’t know what information is important to give you, because we DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO”

I would suggest that the whole purpose of agencies is to provide solutions because clients sometimes don’t know what to do. That’s fine; it’s a natural state to be in. In fact the perfect client brief could potentially start with:

I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO, SO THAT’S WHY I’VE ASKED YOU TO HAVE A LOOK AT THIS FOR ME. I GUESS YOU’VE GOT SOME QUESTIONS….

The cry of “I don’t know what to do!” is not a sign of weakness (although you may want to shy away from yelling it in the company car park or in response to a question from the MD). It is a sign that you need to talk with experienced people who have been in the same situation and successfully navigated a way through it.

Whether client or agency side, as Marketers, Creatives, Designers, Admen, Copywriters or Salespeople our primary function is to communicate and to do that effectively we need to know the what, why, when and how. So the first thing you should do is get talking. Talk to colleagues, peers, competitors or, god forbid, even your agency.

PS: Did we win the pitch? No, of course not. Sour grapes. You bet.