The blame game
After recent pitches marketer Jason Stidworthy realised clients need to take a long hard look at how they act towards agencies.
During a recent conversation with a good mate, he highlighted his frustrations with the real estate agency selling his house because the promotional material artwork was riddled with mistakes including the show-stopping incorrect suburb listing. Seriously, how could they!
Discussions with the 20-something office assistant resulted in no ownership of the mistakes or an apology – and the quick finger pointing at someone else. My mate then went on about this being a 20-something-year-old issue, as he has the same issue in his office with the 20-somethings and their inability to own mistakes or realise the challenges this causes internally and with clients.
This started me thinking about the same issue where I work and I don’t think it is just a 20-something-year-old issue. In the last 12 months I’ve completed 2 agency pitch processes, we ran one internally and the other by an external consultancy. Although there were a number of contributing reasons for the agency roster changes, the pervading theme across a number of the marketing teams (not all) was: It’s the agency’s fault! The agency did or didn’t do this!
Good to hear. Always easy to kick the agency.
I wouldn’t be too worried Jason. NRMA M & S are way ahead of the pack when it comes to respecting their agency partners, from experience. Sadly, its a rare quality.
It always comes from the top down in any organisation.
For an agency person, that is breathtakingly great to read. The result, Jason, will be that your agency will trust and value you, feel motivated to work harder for you, and encourage and coach your junior team. You will reap the benefits of a mature approach.
looking for a new role, agency-side, Jason? 🙂
It’s great to see a marketer go public with this. The process just works so much better when everyone is in it together – agency and marketer. I think the NRMA has travelled a long way on this issue in the last year, and is clearly committed to travelling further.
What would really help is if the marketeer side of things trusted their underlings. When you’re dealing with the bottom-ish level day to day, you’re really creating concepts for things they think will please their boss because they’re not given any autonomy.
The work suffers, but more importantly, both businesses suffer too.
Sorry to day but this made me cringe.
You should read:
Lean Leadership : From Chaos to Carrots to Commitment
by William Lareau