What Marketers REALLY Need From Their Agency Partners

It’s time for agencies to invest more on building Brand Fundamentals and focus on the key strengths of their clients to help them stand out in culture. 

When agencies ask me what they should do to add the greatest value to their clients today, my first answer is: resist the temptation to sell them too much hype, put AI aside for one minute and help them build bulletproof Brand Fundamentals.

Building strong and sharp Brand Fundamentals is the least hyped discipline in marketing and I believe the one with the greatest impact on the return of marketing investment. Yet, I don’t know why it receives so little time and attention from many marketers who - absorbed as they are in their everyday business – forget to prioritise the greatest asset they have been handed: their equity.

There is plenty of evidence showing how hard it has become for brands to stand out and differentiate themselves in the marketplace. A study run by Kantar a couple of years ago puts the finger on what I think is the greatest challenge of the decade for marketers, indicating that the level of differentiation of brands across all industries has dramatically decreased year after year in the last decade.  

The Emerging Differentiation Decay 

How can we explain such a dramatic ‘differentiation decay?’ My take is that many factors such as the uber-intense competition for attention, the greater fragmentation of media platforms and the exponential growth of performance marketing investments at the expense of brand building have all converged, making it harder for brands to stand out, get noticed and be seen as different. Looking forward I don’t see things getting better, with the wider adoption of AI that – if not carefully managed - is likely to make brands look even more similar rather than less.

My personal learning curve taught me that the greatest antidote to this perfect storm is to craft brands that have the clarity and the potency to stand out in culture. These brands are so simple and sharply defined that their centre of gravity can be expressed in just one or two words; i.e. ‘Ultimate Pleasure’ for Magnum Ice Cream or ‘Real Beauty’ for Dove. Their potency is grounded in a deep human truth that helps them build the strongest emotional connections - think Nike’s ‘If you have a body, you are an athlete.’ 

They are incredibly well codified in their ‘boundaries’, starting from their distinctive brand assets – those features that make them easily recognised by colours, logo. etc…  - up to what they deliberately do and don’t, to stay true to who they are.  That also includes the social conversations they lead and what they stay out of, boundaries that allow them to be not just different, but consistently different.

Building strong Brand Fundamentals - instead of ticking the boxes and praying some great creativity will bail out average brand clarity – is pretty hard work and requires the finest and most experienced minds.  This is where agencies can play a critical role, by investing in top-quality strategic planning, elevating their own benchmarks of what good ‘brand fundamentals‘ look like, and taking ownership of educating and inspiring their clients. This will lead to more exciting work and help them be more effective at building memory structures that stand the test of time. 

Brands Building Communities

But if bulletproof Brand Fundamentals are the number one prerequisite to achieving stand out in culture today, then that is not anywhere near enough. 

The growing importance of social media requires brands to be able to lead social conversations not just sporadically but consistently. The best brands at doing this are those that make clear choices about the communities they want to communicate with, they systematically listen to them and build a dialogue that does not stop at a ‘quarterly campaign’ but is truly ‘always on’. These are brands that take inspiration from social conversations to generate creative ideas – rather than always pushing down their own narratives - and show remarkable agility in responding to their communities.

Whilst this does not change the nature and the fundamentals of marketers’ work, it has a profound impact on their communications processes. Brands must add greater flexibility to their media planning to stay continuously salient and build much greater agility in the content creation to be able to generate ideas that are truly social. And they need to learn to deal effectively with content creators to maximise their ability to engage. All of this requires a complete reshaping of the way brands organise their communications processes. That affects the marketing organisation in a way I have never experienced before in the last three decades, not even when digital started to emerge, since it affects every single process from media planning to briefing, from the internal decision-making on content to the shape of the agency ecosystem partnering with the brand. 

In this context, agencies have the opportunity to show their thought leadership, they can go well beyond the mere addition of a social agency to their roster or showing their clients what best practice looks like by actually guiding them through the whole reshaping of those processes and the building of new capabilities.

This might not be as ‘sexy’ as the use of AI or the next marketing buzzword, but I believe that building bulletproof brand fundamentals and navigating the unavoidable reshaping of the brand communication processes under the influence of social media should be at the top of the list of CMOs agendas. Those agencies that want to partner brands that stand out in culture consistently, need to show thought leadership in these two critical areas. 

Hype can wait if it is for a good reason…

Alessandro Manfredi, former CMO of Dove