A child constantly asking "Why?" is one of the most annoying things in the world. But that simplest of all questions is also one of the most important tools in the Planner's armoury. I'd specifically like to focus on one incidence of asking "Why?" in this post, and that's the fundamental question to ask your client or your Account Team every time a new piece of work is started: "Why are we doing this activity?"
The answer is usually to achieve something hard or soft.
Hard: To sell more stuff to more people; to sell more stuff to the same people.
Soft: To make more people see my brand; to make more people understand my brand; to make people talk about my brand.
And the fundamental question, the one simple thing every single Planner must always always ask at this critical stage (and remind everyone throughout the whole process) is:
What is Success?
Put simply, what criteria must this work achieve in order for the client's business, the client herself and the agency to all be happy with the result?
(Not-at-all-cheesy image courtesy of zaraki.kenpachi on Flickr)
In my experience I've usually found there are three kinds of success for every brief:
1) The explicit business and brand Success Criteria.
These are the business goals the activity is hoping to achieve. As stated above they are usually Hard and/ or Soft. Some take time to achieve and some have instant rewards.
Sometimes, these criteria need to be discussed, challenged and debated with the client as they can be contextual to the marketplace or to previous campaigns. It's at this point it's critical for an agency and a Planner to have some kind of understanding of whether the goals are feasible. It's also very important at this stage to debate HOW you're going to measure these criteria, and discuss who will pay for that measurement, but that's a post in itself.
(At some point in my past I was asked by a client to increase sales in a shrinking market during a recession, with a much smaller budget than the market norm, much less budget than the previous year and with no new product to supplement the range. At the same time our key competitors were spending much more, had a better product and were supplementing their range. It's at that point you need an honest discussion about the options you have available to you.)
2) The implicit business, brand and client Success Criteria.
Not to sound too clandestine, but these criteria may never be put onto the briefing form...
You see, these are the criteria the client may allude to when they brief the agency. There's also a role for really good Account Handlers at this stage who know their client as they can really help get under the skin of why they want to do this piece of activity. There's usually a very real reason why (see 1 above) but this is sometimes supplemented with what a client wants to get out of the activity.
Does your client like 'firsts', or the new technology platform everyone is raving about, or do you know she has had an interview elsewhere with a view to moving on? Each of these gives you an opportunity to help them achieve their own career success criteria. And if you help them do that, you'll be in their good books and that's good for you and your agency.
BUT.
It's essential that any guidance at this level which impacts on the creative and strategic answers is absolutely fundamentally in line with the explicit business and brand success criteria. Failure to comply with that is failure of the project pure and simple.
3) The agency Success Criteria.
An agency is a business and as such it has its own business success criteria, and when a relationship between an agency and client is a fruitful one it's because the businesses have mutual goals that allow them to work together for the good of each other. Again, these are hard and soft. Agencies like any other business have to make a profit so there's a simple success criteria right there: will this piece of work be profitable for us? And there are soft measures too. If you want to build the profile of the agency you need to work on projects that allow you to do that. Or if you want to attract the best creative talent (beyond salary) then you need to produce amazingly creative work. The same goes for Planners and effective work. So, from an agency point of view, there should always be the question of: "Why are we doing this work?" And as above, sometimes the results from that are immediate (profit), and sometimes they take time (portfolio work, a door-opener to bigger things).
BUT... to repeat myself above.
It's essential that any guidance at this level which impacts on the creative and strategic answers is absolutely fundamentally in line with the explicit business and brand success criteria. Failure to comply with that is failure of the project pure and simple.
The Sweet Spot
The sweet spot for a long, fruitful and profitable (financially and emotionally) brand, client and agency relationship is that you can hit all three criteria on most pieces of work. That's to say you can achieve business goals, make the client look great and make the agency look great too as well as all making money.
But you'll rarely do any of that if you don't ask that very simple question at the outset, and refer to it when you're critiquing the strategy and creative ideas at every stage.
What is Success?
As with lots of good Planning practices, it's not complicated, but it's profoundly important.
Just realised something had gone wrong with my comment yesterday - great post, cheers Mark.
Posted by: Willem | May 24, 2012 at 01:59 AM