Marketing mix: how agencies can get a seat at the table

Some say that the great res­ig­na­tion – a wave of job chang­ing dur­ing and post-pan­dem­ic – arose because employ­ees have rethought what mat­ters in life. Latent frus­tra­tions have come to the sur­face and there’s a real­i­sa­tion that life’s too short for half-heart­ed­ness. 

This, it has been sug­gest­ed, has extend­ed to the agency-client rela­tion­ship, where com­men­ta­tors believe there is dis­sat­is­fac­tion and dis­il­lu­sion­ment among agency staff. Why? Because agen­cies are no longer at the top table. They have been rel­e­gat­ed to fac­to­tums when to be tru­ly effec­tive, they should be the business’s strate­gic part­ner (not even just the CMOs), help­ing define the com­pa­ny direc­tion from their unique under­stand­ing of which levers to pull, the chan­nels to pull them on and, of course, the cus­tomer. 

“Peo­ple con­flate mar­ket­ing with com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Most agen­cies nev­er ask the client, ‘Why are we doing this?’” says Claire Humphris, CEO of Iris Lon­don.

Under­stand­ing what mar­ket­ing, and there­fore the agen­cies, bring to the table remains hit and miss. It helps to have a CMO who cham­pi­ons the cause and can show the busi­ness the agency’s worth, and then a CEO who leads the organ­i­sa­tion to espouse it. This isn’t easy. Recent research sug­gests that while 86% of CEOs said CMOs had the pow­er and cred­i­bil­i­ty to influ­ence their deci­sions, only 34% said they had con­fi­dence in their CMOs. A fur­ther 38% said their CMOs had the wrong skill set for the chang­ing mar­ket­ing envi­ron­ment. 

But CMOs can­not be both jacks of all trades and experts in all of them. Which means the dri­ve to true cus­tomer-cen­tric­i­ty depends on more agency involve­ment, not less. Cus­tomer-cen­tric­i­ty is one of three key trends that defines today’s mar­ket, along with dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, includ­ing how that reshapes cus­tomer inter­ac­tions, and the ser­vice-dri­ven econ­o­my. 

Lau­rence Parkes is CEO of Rufus Leonard. He explains why now is the time for mar­ket­ing and its agen­cies to break free of their shack­les: “Ser­vices, dig­i­tal and the rise of the cus­tomer-cen­tric mind­set have enabled mar­ket­ing as a ful­ly round­ed con­cept: under­stand­ing the cus­tomer and cre­at­ing val­ue for them through cre­at­ed expe­ri­ences. This is the only true def­i­n­i­tion of mar­ket­ing and is what has allowed good CMOs and their agen­cies to expand their remit.”

Even phys­i­cal prod­uct-dri­ven indus­tries, such as man­u­fac­tur­ing and elec­tron­ic, have moved towards also offer­ing ser­vices to add val­ue and dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion in a crowd­ed mar­ket. To lever­age all these dis­ci­plines, CMOs need part­ners. Andrew Dim­itri­ou, EMEA CEO of VMLY&R, insists: “A good agency is involved in all aspects of a client’s busi­ness, sit­ting on prod­uct inno­va­tion boards. There, day in, day out.”

It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant today because, as Humphris adds, cus­tomer prob­lems sit out­side siloes, and so the agency needs to sit out­side them too. It can be cul­tur­al­ly dif­fi­cult for client organ­i­sa­tions to accept. It is the task of lead­er­ship to open doors to the agen­cies and encour­age peo­ple to work togeth­er to resolve chal­lenges. But sup­port must be firm. “The senior stake­hold­er has to lay that down from the out­set,” Humphris warns.

Some client organ­i­sa­tions already see the val­ue of an agency in tak­ing a holis­tic view of their busi­ness. The trend towards agile, respon­sive mar­ket­ing means busi­ness­es must react fast to chang­ing cus­tomer expec­ta­tions – nev­er more so than in the pan­dem­ic. 

Even today, post-pan­dem­ic, the land­scape is chang­ing fast. Clients don’t have the capac­i­ty in-house to engage with all the lat­est trends – the meta­verse, for exam­ple – to eval­u­ate their worth and plot how to inte­grate them. But with­out doing so, they risk being left behind. “Our job is to under­stand that world [the meta­verse], what the lat­est is from a con­sumer point of view and bring it into the busi­ness, and how it cre­ates val­ue,” Dim­itri­ou explains.

Agen­cies could dri­ve inno­va­tion and exper­i­men­ta­tion with­out exten­sive retool­ing by an estab­lished busi­ness. Could the idea that agen­cies are sim­ply the ‘cre­ative’ arm be stop­ping organ­i­sa­tions from embrac­ing them? If so, they’re miss­ing out. “Cre­ativ­i­ty is about find­ing solu­tions that help a busi­ness inter­act with its poten­tial cus­tomer in a way that is eas­i­er, smoother and dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed. If more peo­ple thought of them­selves as cre­ative, it would be lib­er­at­ing,” Humphris admits. 

Even then, with the huge vari­ety of skills and dis­ci­plines involved in build­ing a cus­tomer-cen­tric busi­ness, it’s unlike­ly any sin­gle agency can become a one-stop-shop for a client. This is where excel­lent net­work­ing capa­bil­i­ties come to the fore. 

Parkes says: “It’s hard to have breadth of capa­bil­i­ty in an agency of 65 peo­ple. It’s a chal­lenge for agen­cies to man­age that breadth. We take the ecosys­tem approach – it’s an excel­lent solu­tion to the prob­lem.”

Of course, when agen­cies and inter­nal depart­ments all start to break out of their siloes, there is enor­mous poten­tial for chaos to ensue. Keep­ing agen­cies in box­es and restrict­ing their influ­ence to direct reports was an eas­i­er – if lim­it­ing – rela­tion­ship to man­age. Work­ing with agen­cies across the entire organ­i­sa­tion presents new chal­lenges for the busi­ness: whose respon­si­bil­i­ty is this alliance? 

“Cer­tain clients are already there with mar­ket­ing oper­a­tions,” Dim­itri­ou reveals. Mar­ket­ing oper­a­tions, or MOps, while seem­ing­ly still siloed in the mar­ket­ing depart­ment, are a solu­tion to help func­tions – tech­ni­cal, intel­lec­tu­al and more – engage across the organ­i­sa­tion in a coor­di­nat­ed and effec­tive man­ner. Mar­ket­ing soft­ware com­pa­ny Hub­spot has a neat anal­o­gy to define MOps. In the School of Rock film, in which a mot­ley group of pupils and a rene­gade teacher form a band, actor Jack Black approach­es the class pres­i­dent and says: “Sum­mer, you’re in charge of the whole thing.”

It isn’t sim­ply that agen­cies deserve a seat at the top table, although they sure­ly do. It’s about real­is­ing that, if an organ­i­sa­tion is com­mit­ted to break­ing down its inter­nal siloes to become tru­ly cus­tomer-cen­tric, it needs to break down its exter­nal ones too, and open itself to the poten­tial that agen­cies have to offer – at every lev­el.