Marketing is Like Marital Bliss

Great marketing begins with a great marriage. And that sometimes means tough love.

A good agency will give a client what it needs, not what it wants. That’s why a company hires an agency in the first place — to tell it what it needs. Yet once the ink has dried on the contract, suddenly the company is telling the agency what it wants.

When you live and breathe a brand as well as the internal company culture and politics, it’s often hard to see the forest through the trees. Companies often hire marketing agencies because they know they need a third-party perspective. They are looking for something that they know they cannot produce in-house.

An agency can see your brand for what it is — without the cloud of internal politics, corporate nuances and marketing clutter. An agency looks at what your audience wants and what your message should be.

The agency-client relationship is not dating. It’s a marriage. It’s a big investment with both parties and something that should not be entered into lightly. But when you both say “I do,” the company needs to trust its agency. The company needs to allow the firm to produce great work that will move the brand forward.
So often we are hired to cut through the clutter with bold messages and break-through advertising campaigns and then we present it to a client and it gets watered down. The very “vanilla” the client hired us to get rid of is what it really wants.

Read the full article in the Sacramento Business Journal for more on how to get the most out of your ad/PR agency relationship: http://ow.ly/yD36x

(Full article available to Sacramento Business Journal subscribers only)