Putting on our client’s shoes

As consultants in the business of brand creation, we spend so much time understanding the behaviours and motivations of our clients’ customers, but do we really understand the mindset of our primary customer? Our client.

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Brand Director, Chief Executive Officer, the leadership team.

To truly know your audience and metaphorically wear their shoes is something close to marketing nirvana. Considering that marketing is about understanding and meeting the needs of your customers, putting on their shoes (so to speak) is a great thing. It will give you a competitive advantage. When you can speak the customer’s language the level of engagement and credibility will be so much higher.

The cultures of working inhouse and agency side we know are rather different. Agencies characterised by their creative and more informal environments, with inhouse erring to the more corporate, the marketing teams being just one of many operational teams.

But having an empathy for both sides can be invaluable for nurturing successful agency-client relationships and delivering outstanding work.

When marketing consulting services to clients and to have put yourself in your client’s shoes, will have given you the experience of a distinct 360 degree perspective. It gives you an inner mindset and genuine empathy for their challenges, a unique lens through which to see everything.

CMO’s and their teams today are increasingly juggling with an ever-changing role requiring critical commercial accountability for their investment in all marketing mix elements of their brand (from left brain analytics to right brain creativity) and a proliferation of customer experience touch points across the digital landscape.

Here are a few of our own first-hand experiences:

For clients:

To have a laser clear focus in your brief of your future desired brand ambition, objectives and goals, before thinking about briefing / engaging agencies and consultants on any major branding project or campaign. As the ultimate champion of your brand, it surely deserves this level of preparation. A cogent written brief means you have a concrete briefing tool to keep conversations with all agencies absolutely consistent. If you do initially have verbal conversations, this should be followed with a written brief or request for an agency proposal. In essence, the clearer the focus of the brief the stronger the thinking and ideas for brand innovation.

If needs must, you can always as a commissioning client ask your agency to help you write the brief. But don’t forget to compensate them. They are really helping you out here.

For agencies / consultants

To always have a clear understanding that this is not the only project your client is working on and will be one of many. The world won’t stop because of your work. Yes your work maybe pivotal to the strategic business well-being of the brand, but the CMO and their team won’t just be working on upstream strategic branding initiatives but also a whole raft of work more downstream activities that will include systems, operations, CRM databases and activations of launches / campaigns. Its business as usual.

People who have spent time in both agency / consultant and client worlds have a truly rounded view of the agency-client dynamics and a level of emotional intelligence that will be a great asset in all their consultancy work.

It goes without saying that brands express themselves in multiple channels so as brand consultants an appreciation (albeit high level) of all these channels is paramount as the work we produce is essentially the glue at the heart of it all.

Agency and consultancy folk should spend some time in and amongst your clients. Ideally a role or two in house will be great experience but if not, some time perhaps on a short secondment within a client setting will be worth its weight in gold. How often do we hear of Tim Cooke turning up in an Apple store pitching in as one of the staff to help customers. 

Put yourself in your customers shoes, speak their language and enjoy the very real advantage. Your clients will truly respect you for it.

Tony Lorenz

Strategy and Planning Director