Making brands more distinctive

I’ve found a number of things heartening in these trying times. Especially in the way that many clients and suppliers have all rallied around to support each other. A reaffirmed sense of purpose, transparency, respect and communication has helped get us through the last few weeks.

This I not just in the sense of positive words but in real action.

Just take that perennial bugbear, budgets. Often budgeting for projects is a bit of a complex dance between pitching, negotiating, arm-twisting, and finally settling on an agreed outcome. I can’t be the only agency head who has, at some point, cried, ‘just tell us the budget!”. Over the last few weeks clients and suppliers have been candid and quick to communicate what budgets they could work to. This refreshing clarity, honesty and pragmatism has provided a much-needed change to the usual budget wrangling. This, so far, has given us the confidence to carry on with a purpose. Without this new-found mutual transparency things may well be very different.

Next, respect. Maintaining mutual transparency with objectives in mind is a pretty natural place for all of us to be with our clients. Often it takes time building trust to actually get there though. What is clear is that this rediscovered respect creates an even greater sense of mutual support across the client agency divide. Too often I have pitched to potential clients who, due to having fingers burnt on numerous occasions, have an unhealthy disregard for agencies. The lack of respect is shown in the way that budgets, objectives, motivations and purpose for pitches need to be guessed at. Equally agencies have burnt client fingers with inflated promises, unachievable objectives and their own over-inflated self-belief. It’s a death dance that once you’re in is hard to end. Let’s hope that the positive nature of mutual respect continues and starts to erode bad practice across the board. Wishful thinking maybe, but we have to be the change we want to see.

Along with transparency and respect it was reassuring to know that clients and suppliers were simply there to talk to when we needed. We did the same. Knowing that care was being taken to communicate as soon as possible was a great support. It left us the time to focus on getting the job done right and caring for our own team.

There have been clients who have asked us to reduce our costs for potential projects or asked for proposals without giving a target budget to aim for. The kind of guessing game that does no-one any good. Now is not the time to see what you can get away with.

If anything changes after we’re all back to ‘normal’, and things must inevitably change, then I hope its ongoing and greater transparency, support and mutual respect between agencies, clients and suppliers.

So, a big thanks to those who support us, we’ll keep on supporting you. Those who asked for our margins to be slashed without giving an indication of what you could afford or asked for complex, time consuming pitches whilst refusing to divulge budgets – you’re the past.