‘Agencies are failing to solve actual business problems?’ No kidding!
In order to fully benefit their clients, agencies need to start solving actual business problems rather than simply doing some “fancy photoshopping”, writes agency director Tyson Carr.
At the recent Mumbrella360 conference, a panel of former big brand marketers warned agencies that they might be nailing briefs but they are failing to solve actual business problems. To that, I say: no kidding. The truth of the matter is most traditional above-the-line agencies haven’t a clue how to solve challenges that encompass departments within their client’s businesses beyond the marketing team. 
Traditional agencies are set up to market to consumers, plain and simple. But business challenges go far beyond that to include a range of audiences from internal stakeholders to B2B audiences and even shareholders. In a lot of cases, traditional agencies don’t have the experience or expertise to work with these types of audiences because they’ve never done so. The reality is, audiences beyond the consumer have a very different involvement or investment in the business than a consumer does so, obviously, they need to be treated differently.
The sad thing is, agencies have the skills to nail all sorts of issues clients are facing. The industry is abuzz with the value of strategy, creativity and data and how they all work together to solve marketing challenges. I’d argue strategy, creativity and data are not tools exclusively available to marketing departments. An approach that uses strategy and creativity informed by analytics is effectively the same no matter what department a problem stems from.
The CMO’s responsibility
Interestingly, this week NYTimes published an article about Jaguar/Land Rover using phone gamification in their recruitment process. When you take on employees in this manner, you create a culture imbued with an up-to-date understanding of what has just been explained here. Makes that upstream swim so much easier.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/business/jaguar-land-rover-app-puzzles.html
Good piece Tyson.
Intelligent piece. Unlike the original comment. Bravo
Absolutely. When you have the confidence of the CEO and leadership team and can work across and with the team – that’s when you can really drive results from the inside to out.
Good article, thanks.
I know this is not your central point, but your example… “The reason people aren’t walking into dealerships is because the dealership experience is intimidating and often cold”… is only partly true. If we are talking about addressing business issues, then it is critical that the fundamental business issue is identified, not the apparent one.
Online now plays a huge part in the purchase decision process for almost all car buyers. No doubt “intimidating and often cold” dealerships are one reason for the attractiveness of the online auto research process, but instrumental in this shift away from car yards is digital’s ease of search, comparison tools, official and user reviews, videos and more.. all from the comfort of your laptop or mobile… so that the old trapsing around car yards is now done virtually instead. As a result, the purchase cycle is now faster, more brands are placed on the consideration set and much of the decision making is done prior to the dealer visit. Dealers now know that footfall has reduced yet purchase intent is far higher because most consumers have decided on their car prior to leaving the home… so the dealer visit is now just the final step. A warm and inviting dealership is useless if I have already made the decision go and buy a different brand of car from the dealer down the road.
Marketers and agencies in this sector must therefore fight hard to pursuade prospective buyers through comms along this digital path to purchase, because once they leave home to go to a dealership, it’s already too late.
A very good piece Tyson. And the challenge for some businesses runs very deep – within organisations there are often different values and departmental sub-brands at play that foster distrust of those not in ones own department and so share disjointed brand messaging and disjointed outcomes. Since we are great at seeing our own strengths but not our weaknesses, we are great at pointing out the problem as being elsewhere (it is), but neglect to see it with ourselves (it is).
Strong brand unity can only occur when these issues are met and addressed through unity of business departments and with much humility. Until then within businesses it is applying band-aids, and for marketing departments their turd-polishing is unrealistically expected to lift a weight for the business that of course could never ever be lifted merely by traditional marketing.