There’s a common premise in advertising: the client is always right.

It worries me.

Being ‘right’ is a perspective, not an absolute

To some extent, clients will always choose the right answer.

But clients are people, and they have their own goals and ambitions.

And therein lies the problem.

What’s right for them, and what’s right for their brands, aren’t necessarily the same thing.

It’s the ideal excuse

“Let’s just give the client what they want.”

Sometimes, doing what the client wants is the right thing for the agency and its client relationship; you have to choose your battles.

But using this defense before we’ve proposed a better solution is just lazy.

It’s not easy to persuade someone to do something different to what they want.

But if we can prove – objectively – that our solution is more appropriate, we have an obligation to push that solution.

We’re failing in our commitments and our promises to our clients if we don’t.

Justify your love

Neil points out that the most common reason clients don’t go with the best answer is because we haven’t explained it properly:

Let’s face it: you just haven’t persuaded them that it’s a good enough idea.

Or worse, they think it is a good idea, but they don’t trust you enough to implement it without screwing it up.

In such circumstances, we need to rethink our approach.

Take time to identify their concerns, and also what they think makes an alternative better.

If it’s just a question of subjective taste, let it go; questioning someone’s taste is rarely constructive relationship-building.

Your task is to demonstrate objectively – i.e. beyond all reasonable doubt – which solution is best for the brand’s current context.

If their argument is based on valid rationale, but you’re unconvinced by the current articulation, identify ways to build on it.

It’s critical to remember that success isn’t about getting your idea into market; it’s about getting the best answer into market.

And if you still believe your solution is better, you need to prove why it’s in their personal best interests to believe you.

Who are you talking to?

Remember that your client is the first audience you need to persuade, and as with any other communication, success is always about them.

Show them how the best idea for the brand will also help them achieve their individual KPIs, and they’ll probably warm to it.

The trick is showing them why your right answer is the right answer for them too.

Then you can both be right.

Most marketers know that relationships are central to building their brands.

But what does this actually mean?

We build a variety of relationships every day in our personal and professional lives, but much of this goes on subconsciously, and we rarely stop to think about how we do it.

Given this, it might help to take a look at how a typical brand relationship evolves, and the things we can do to strengthen and deepen its bonds.

The evolution of a relationship

From a marketing perspective, there are seven basic stages in the development of a brand relationship:

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Before we analyse each step individually, it’s important to note that relationships develop sequentially.

Although it may sometimes appear that relationships ‘jump’ some steps, the reality in such situations is that people simply progress through the intermediate steps in rapid succession.

Because of this linearity, it’s vital that marketers understand all the steps they must move their brands through on their journey to success.

In the beginning

It is possible for people to generate value for a brand before they’re aware of it, but this value is coincidental.

A ‘relationship’ can only begin when a person becomes aware of the brand.

Consequently, the brand’s first key task is to raise awareness.

That may sound glib, but it introduces a critical point:

Only in situations where people have never heard of the brand should we concern ourselves with building ‘awareness’.

Many established brands talk about the need to raise awareness, but it is unlikely that this will their most important challenge.

Breeding familiarity

In the early stages of a brand relationship, people may recognise only its most fundamental attributes:  its name, its logo, its packaging.

Many brands confuse this recognition for success, focusing all their resources on achieving the highest possible awareness, and so never progressing beyond this stage.

However, in order to create value, awareness must translate into consideration.

Positioning the brand

People will only consider a brand if they believe it can help them satisfy their wants and needs.

However, in order to develop this perception, people must first understand what the brand stands for.

Brands establish this through articulating a positioning and a proposition:

Positioning
What the brand wants to stand for in a person’s heart and mind, relative to alternatives.

Proposition
The most compelling reason why someone should choose the brand over alternatives.

Developing a relevant positioning and compelling proposition are the most important steps in a brand’s evolution.

However, they only become valuable once the brand’s intended audiences and consumers understand them.

Communicating the brand’s core, differentiated benefit is critical; any brand that fails to do so will only ever realise a tiny fraction of its potential value:

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(You can find more on differentiation in this post).

Reinforcing relevance

Once people understand the brand’s positioning, the next task is to ensure that they understand why that positioning is relevant to their wants and needs.

Although this often happens in tandem with the previous step, it does not happen by default.

Furthermore, the brand can still establish relevance at a subsequent point, even if people fail to understand its relevance straight away.

However, the only way to establish this relevance is by showing people how the brand makes their life better.

There are numerous ways to do this, but they must always focus on the audience’s perspective.

Strengthening the bond

Once a brand has demonstrated relevance, it has succeeded in fostering consideration.

The challenges involved in translating this into preference – i.e. progressing from relevance through to favourite – are broadly the same, but they depend on each brand’s specific context.

Because of this, brands should make extensive use of research to identify the specific barriers that hinder the brand’s progress.

Some of these barriers may be subjective, resulting from differences in individual taste.

Others will be more objective; for example, people may be satisfied with an existing solution, or it may be too much hassle for them to change existing habits.

However, enabling people to experience the brand’s benefits on more than one occasion will help to build a momentum that will make it easier to overcome both types of hurdle.

As a result, activities like ‘re-sampling’ – where sampling drives a subsequent experience rather than just an initial ‘taster’ – can play a highly effective role.

Unwavering commitment

‘True’ brand loyalty only occurs when people will accept no alternative: when they’ll leave a store empty handed if their chosen brand isn’t available.

Although the Cola Wars suggested such loyalty might be commonplace, the reality is that few brands ever achieve this kind of unique relationship.

The only way to build and maintain such a relationship is through two-way commitment – i.e. the brand must prove that it’s willing to give people back as much as it hopes to receive.

However, even if a brand reaches this nirvana state, its job is not complete.

Constant flux

Relationships evolve all the time.

The dynamics that exist between a person’s various relationships, and how their needs and desires change over time, mean that relationships function much like stocks and shares: their value can go up as well as down.

Get things really wrong, and they can also go bankrupt.

The only way to ensure that your relationships survive and continue to deliver the value you hope is to monitor their health on a regular basis, and to continue working at them, all the time.

And there’s only one way to do that…

All one-way?

As we saw above, the prospect of a relationship arises when one party becomes aware of the other.

However, a relationship only really begins when there is interaction – a relevant degree of give and take.

Without this reciprocity, the ‘relationship’ is nothing more than a one-way transaction.

Sadly, many brands are stuck in this transactional mindset: they operate like celebrities, building legions of ‘fans’, but remaining ignorant of those people except for their contribution to statistics.

However, in today’s hypersocial world, that approach limits a brand’s ability to progress to the deepest levels of relationship engagement.

People are increasingly demonstrating preference for brands that are active members of their communities, and cold, distant brands risk alienation.

Conclusions

If you want to build valuable relationships, you’ve got to draw people in deeper.

That involves giving people a good reason to increase their levels of engagement, and this is dependent on active participation and interaction.

Brands need to show people that they care, and that they’re willing to give back as much as they take.

In other words, we need to build partnerships.

Geb over at Ruby Pseudo shared an interesting perspective on youth marketing recently.

The opening line of the post sums it up:

“Not many brands ‘get’ the youth market; they’re either too in-your-face, or try too hard to be ‘down with the kids’.”

Some brands do get it right though, as demonstrated by a recent partnership between Burger King and a Singaporean fashion brand, Flesh Imp.

Flesh Imp have designed a range of items as part of the tie-up, including some great T-shirts and headwear, and have implemented some engaging in-store activity too.

The result feels very natural: a hint of self-deprecating irony from both brands builds their respective personalities by showing that neither takes itself too seriously.

Nicholas at Flesh Imp gave me a bit of background to the whole collaboration, but it’s probably easiest to let some pictures from the brand’s flickr tell the story instead:

‘King’ playing card T

T-shirts come packed in great ‘take-away’ boxes

The window dressing at the chain’s flagship store

‘King’ T close up

Have it your way…

Limited edition headwear

Here’s your order

The brand has put together a great Facebook profile that shows more of the collaboration:

[click image to enlarge]

The whole tie-up fits nicely with the global BK Studio initiative – something that Flesh Imp have helped the brand with before:

BK isn’t the only multinational brand that Flesh Imp has collaborated with though.

This clip gives a taste of some great work they produced on behalf of Coke Zero, again in Singapore:

They did a great line for the Transformers movie too:

Flesh Imp 3D Transformers T

The magic ingredient that makes all these tie-ups work is authenticity: Flesh Imp manages to find an overlap in relevance between these large brands’ positionings and its own irreverent personality.

There’s a similarity to the Adidas Originals approach:

The difference is that Flesh Imp creates success for partner brands as well as its own, connecting them with a more cynical, younger audience.

As Nicholas pointed out, how many ad agencies could achieve that kind of impact?

As Ruby might say… Nice.

See more on the Flesh Imp tie-ups on their official blog, facebook and flickr sites.

The clip above is an enlightening talk by novelist Chimamanda Adichie.

Central to her argument is an implicit, yet critical question: what makes people similar?

As Chimamanda illustrates, it’s not ethnicity; nor is it age, or gender, or income, or any of those other ’statistics’.

So why does almost every brief still include demographics?

It’s ironic: our task is to separate our brands from the masses, but the first thing we do is to group individual people together into a mass.

It makes no sense; we all know that everyone wants to be recognised as an individual.

Do we really expect to form a bond with our audiences if we treat them in the exact opposite way to that which they hope?

I recognise that it’s unrealistic to approach every individual in a unique manner, but it’s high time demographics disappeared from our toolkit.

Because no matter who your audience is, it’s always made up of individual people.

Thanks to Slava for introducing me to the talk.

More wise words, this time from Winston Churchill.

A fine observation from Albert Einstein, courtesy of littlemiss

There’s something about this sign’s implicit complicity that establishes instant affinity.

Very simple, but highly engaging.

I think the image first appeared here, but I found it thanks to these subsequent reposts.

John shared this gem a while ago, and I couldn’t resist re-posting it here.

Cory’s statement is truly insightful: content like music, films, novels, and news is valuable in and of itself, but its value increases exponentially when it enables us to connect with others.

Because it’s those connections that people really care about.

So don’t just think about how you can connect your brand to your audience.

Think about how your brand can help your audience connect with each other as well.

John has lots of other great stuff on his blog – go take a look

Jon alerted me to a disturbing report on eMarketer yesterday.

Apparently, most marketers still think that one-night stands are better than long-term relationships:

According to the accompanying article,

“Nearly three-quarters of companies have guidelines to measure the success of their marketing programs, and for one-half such measurements are a requirement for obtaining marketing funding.”

This statement implies that more than 25% of the marketers polled don’t measure marketing success in any way.

I’m shocked.

To make matters worse, the majority of those who do measure their marketing see new acquisitions as the ‘best’ indication of success.

I don’t understand; it’s no secret that nurturing existing customers delivers better ROI than trying to attract new ones all the time.

I recognise that growing the customer base is important, but surely their retention, or even satisfaction, gives a better indication of marketing success?

Oddly, in the same article, the report’s author notes:

“Marketers have been aware of the effectiveness of building relationships and trust with content since long before the Internet…”

So why are those same marketers ignoring opportunities to build relationships, and instead resorting to transaction-based, ‘groundhog’ marketing?

Perhaps it’s not just ad measurement that needs to evolve; perhaps it’s all marketing measurement.

Then again, maybe the real problem is a lack of understanding of fundamental marketing principles.

Maybe it’s time to go back to basics…

Marketing is similar to conducting an orchestra: our role is to bring all the different pieces of a story together into one, harmonious experience.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but this superb TED talk from Itay Talgam helped to bring those thoughts together:

Itay’s points have relevance to many areas of business, but they seem particularly pertinent to today’s world of participative brand relationships.

Let’s explore his points in a bit more depth.

Be as one

Itay begins his talk by observing that, until the conductor arrives, the orchestra is just making noise.

Some of that noise may stand out above the rest, but ultimately, the noise lacks a coherent structure.

A conductor’s role is to establish that structure:

“The conductor enables eveyone’s story to be heard at the same time.”

It’s important to remember that brands only exist in people’s minds, and their perceptions differ depending on individual experiences and context.

Some people hear different parts of our brand’s music in different ways, and those differences lead to differing perceptions and preferences.

As marketers, we need to ensure that the important instruments stand out, but also that they all come together in one, harmonious melody.

Communications should work as an ensemble

When combined effectively, a full orchestra delivers a far richer experience than any one instrument can on its own.

The same principle applies to communications channels (i.e. media): we can use the power of a ’solo’ where appropriate, but relying too heavily on just one instrument can limit your potential.

Our task is to take the beauty and power inherent in each instrument, and weave each of them together into a rich symphony.

Audience participation is a double-edged sword

The clip Itay shows of the Viennese audience clapping along to the music is a great example of audience participation.

Rather than ‘interfering’ with the performance, their contribution adds to the ’story’ and elevates the experience.

However, such participation would have ruined a rendition of Mozart’s Moonlight Sonata:

Where it’s relevant, audience participation can play a valuable part in the experience, but it’s critical to remember that it’s not always relevant.

Our task is to identify when it makes sense to harness participation, and then influence and guide it to ensure that it doesn’t become an unwelcome distraction.

Inspiration vs. control

Itay tells the story of the conductor at La Scala, who was forced to resign because he was overly commanding.

As Itay notes, trying to control with an iron fist removes the possibility of partnership – a loss that would have serious consequences in a world where participation is becoming increasingly important.

If we try too hard to command the conversations surrounding our brands, we risk suffocating them.

Instead, we need to shift our focus from control to guidance – as Itay suggests,

“Open a space for players to add in another layer of interpretation — their own.”

We can guide the conversation along a particular path, but we need to allow that conversation the freedom to evolve of its own accord as well.

Immerse yourself

Quite early on in his talk, Itay notes that:

“success comes from happiness”

I’ve mentioned this before: if you want to be the best at what you do, you’ve got to love doing it.

Most importantly, you’ve got to get involved.

A means vs. the end

For me, the most salient point in Itay’s talk is when he contrasts interpretation with execution.

As marketers in a social world, our role is to inspire; not to control.

That will inevitably lead to some unexpected results; sometimes, people will interpret our efforts in a way that is markedly different to what we’d intended.

However, as long as the the results are still favourable, there’s little reason to worry: there are many different routes to success, and it’s arriving at the destination that counts.

All the right notes…

I’ll conclude with a point I’ve made a few times before: success in marketing depends on them, not you.

Sometimes, even if you play all the right notes, you can’t guarantee you’ll achieve success.

Take it away Eric, Ernie, and André…

Thanks very much to John for sowing the seeds of this post in my mind, and to Inaki for introducing me to Itay’s TED talk.