Client/agency partnerships – a marriage of science
and creativity

By Brian D Smith

Central to any brand team’s purpose is the work it does with its external partners such as creative agencies. That work begins inside the brand team with setting strong, functional marketing objectives. I covered how to set relevant marketing objectives in the first article in this series. But then begins the agency-client partnership, the first step of which is selecting the right agency. That critical choice is the subject of this second article, which will be followed by two further articles about how to brief the agency and how to design a campaign, to complete the four-part series.

I often hear brand managers talk about their agencies being good or bad and, just as often, I’ll hear agencies lament or praise their clients. I take those comments with the same pinch of salt as when I hear friends talk about their spouses’ strengths and weaknesses.

I’ve been in enough relationships – commercial and otherwise – to know that most clients, most agencies and indeed most people are good enough and rarely ‘bad’. So whether a relationship sustainably succeeds or disastrously fails is less about the qualities of the individual partners and more about whether they are a good match. And, in the case of the relationship between a life sciences brand team and a creative agency, this is an especially germane metaphor.

The collision between the scientific, regulated, compliant culture of a pharma or medtech brand team and that of an imaginative, free-thinking, innovative agency is akin to a date between two people from very different socioeconomic backgrounds.

‘All organisations operate on a set of core assumptions about how the world works and what it takes to survive and thrive in that world’

That is not to say that they can’t have a long, happy and fecund relationship. But it does mean that both parts need to take off their love-spectacles and be unromantically business-like about assessing their mutual compatibility. To do this, they should ask each other four questions.

Although they are unconscious and unspoken, all organisations operate on a set of core assumptions about how the world works and what it takes to survive and thrive in that world. These world views, as they are known, come from deep in a firm’s history, often from its founders. And they exist because they helped your firm survive and get to its current successful position. So although firms talk about culture change, changing the core assumptions at the root of your culture is both difficult and often counterproductive. These assumptions are numerous, varied and powerful, because they shape our working patterns like our genes shape our faces. In the context of the brand team and agency, the critical assumptions are about the role that marketing communications plays in a brand’s success.  We all sit on a spectrum from believing marketing communications to be a transformative force capable of changing the world to seeing it as a necessary but insufficient element that complements the product attributes, pricing strategies and the rest of the marketing mix.  And, like a totalitarian marrying a democrat, two very different world views make for a difficult relationship. So clients should ask their potential agencies about their past successes and failures and listen for balance. Victories attributed solely to design and other creative inputs tell you that they’re at one end of the spectrum. More holistic assessments of their work as contributions to the success of a wider brand strategy tell you the opposite. And that information hints at whether you see the world the same way and therefore have the potential to work well together.

While our unconscious and embedded core assumptions are important in shaping our working behaviour, they aren’t the only factor in making us who we are. We’re each the product of our working history in our present and past companies. Each of those prior working experiences has given us a set of beliefs about what is valuable and what is not. If you think carefully about it, you will realise that what you do and how you do it reflects your deeply held values learned from experience. For example, I’m always punctual, because I value other people’s time as well as my own. I react against pedants because I value the big picture against pettifogging detail. You, for example, might insist on writing prompt notes to follow up every meeting because you value focus and professionalism. Or you might like sharing early, undeveloped thoughts because you value co-creation of ideas. Whatever values are reflected by your actions, they are yours, they are hard to change and they pervade how you like to work. It’s unlikely you can work with an agency that doesn’t share your values, so you should seek a match or at least avoid a conflict of values. There’s little point asking your would-be agency about its values, as you will hear only platitudes about the client being king and commitment to creativity. Instead, ask potential agencies seemingly trivial questions about timekeeping, follow-ups, idea sharing or other things that are important to you. Even though they will massage and spin their answers, the agency values will peep through and your emotional intelligence will pick up on the cues. Added to what you’ve deduced about their core assumptions, you’ve now got second insight into how compatible your values and theirs might be.

At the fundamental level of core assumptions and values, it is important that a client and an agency are similar. But, as the analogy with romantic relationships tells us, similarity at a fundamental level allows for useful complementary differences at a working level.

‘Although firms talk about culture change, changing the core assumptions at the root of your culture is both difficult and often counterproductive’

Translated into the client-agency relationship, this equates to different but complementary competencies. If you’re strong at big-picture strategy but weak at proofreading, a strategically oriented agency that lacks attention to detail is a poor match for you. If you’re the queen of the Gantt chart, you don’t need an agency to do that for you. And if, like me, you’re aesthetically challenged, then an agency that has that sense is essential to you. Alternatively, if you’re the sort of person who might have been a creative director in a previous life, then you’re going to gain most from working with an agency that is more focused on execution that creation. In the particular case of the highly fragmented life sciences industry, this complementarity is important for knowledge as well as capabilities. If you’re a newbie in a product category, disease area or a healthcare tier, then an agency that counterbalances your ignorance with its specific prior experience is very helpful. Conversely, if you’re both narrowly focused on the same market niche, then together you might lack the fresh perspective and insight that your differences might bring.

Again, there’s little point in asking potential agencies directly about their capabilities and expecting answers that are both honest and objective. Neither organisations nor people are good at describing themselves, especially if their livelihood is at stake. To test for complementarity between your competencies and the agency’s, ask about its past projects and listen actively for where it complemented its clients’ strengths and weaknesses with its own, different attributes. In particular, search for instances of its agency weaknesses being mitigated by its clients’ strengths and vice versa. If you spot the equivalent of that married couple behaviour where their differences make them indispensable to each other, then you may have found a keeper.

At a very interesting dinner party, I once sat next to a relationship counsellor and found myself saying: “I assume it’s essential that a married couple agree with each other about the most important things?” To my surprise and embarrassment, this made her roar with laughter. “Goodness, whatever makes you think that?” she said. “Every happy couple I know disagree about lots of things, big and small.” Sensing my confusion, she helped me out. “The happiest couples aren’t the ones that agree, Brian, they’re the ones that disagree about things but have worked out a good way to manage their disagreements.”

Her answer has often surfaced in my memory when I’ve been part of a client/agency relationship. There seem to be three elements of successful, sustainable disagreement management. The first is timing and the earlier an issue is raised, the better. The second is style and resorting to written evidence of who is right and who is wrong is usually to be avoided. The third is balance. It might seem like one side conceding to the other – for example, the agency to the client – is ideal but it is not sustainable. So, addressing disagreements early, in a non-legalistic way that shows give and take is the ideal. And the opposite – legalistic management of festering issues that result in one-sided caving most of the time – is a recipe for a bad break-up. The only way I know to see an agency’s preferred disagreement resolution style is to ask how it might resolve hypothetical disagreements. If you design them to reveal late, legalistic, unbalanced resolution styles, you can gain insight into that agency’s habits. And, since it’s as hard for an agency to change its habits as it is for a person, this can tell you a lot about the future of your potential relationship.

The extended metaphor of this article, between a client/agency relationship and a romantic relationship, is more than a contrived author’s device. There are many other ways the two are similar. For example, not all interactions are relationships, some are mere transactions. You may be seeking a transaction, but probably not. Equally, both personal and professional relationships should be based on mutual respect and trust but aren’t always.
If you suspect lack of either, beware. Finally, both kinds of relationship should be fun and productive, but some can be abusive entrapments. Even in a commercial relationship, the latter aren’t worth staying in.

With these parallels in mind, it’s obvious that it’s worth trying for a good client/agency relationship and avoiding a bad one. Which leads to my last observation of the lessons that we can draw from romantic relationships when, metaphorically, a client ‘gets into bed’ with a creative agency. Relationships of both kinds involve investments of time, effort and money. Not to mention the opportunity cost of missing out on a better relationship. But there’s also an emotional investment and a sharing of each others’ secrets that creates a mutual vulnerability. For all those reasons, divorce is best avoided and the best way to do that is make the right choice at the beginning. Nothing in life is guaranteed, especially in relationships, but the four questions in this article will help both sides set their expectations for a long marriage.