Company to Customer Relationship - The Business of Building Businesses

Paul S. Allen
Allen & Gerritsen
CEO

Succeeding in the Advertising World

Success in advertising requires the ability to have a fundamental grasp of both sides of our business. First is the strategic side, providing marketing counsel and tactical marketing help for our clients’ businesses. To communicate and advertise effectively on behalf of a business, you need to look at a client’s company and conceptualize it. This means not just looking at the hard products and services it sells and what benefits they bring to customers, but understanding theoretically what that client’s business is all about: having a deep understanding of the business’s fundamental disciplines and being able to analyze it objectively. The other side involves creativity and communication: the ability to take that conceptual understanding and turn it into communications, messages, and advertising truly connected to the strategy.

Advertising is not simply an art, it is a science and an art, and I believe the science is getting more important. Science will make the art do necessary things: create action and make the delivery more appropriate. More and more, it is less about how you say something (the creative) and more about what you’re actually saying. Messages must be more meaningful and relevant to the target audiences to earn their notice and acceptance. Companies must try to fit into their customers’ lives versus just talking at them. The science of strategic messaging is what adds the insights and new perspectives that drive communications.

At the end of the day, our business runs into the same commoditization problems that affect any industry. We all think about creative then we make creative. Our differentiation—or at least the thing we have really focused on—is our proprietary models on the strategic side of the equation. We are trying to change the way clients think about relationships with their customers and the way they think about how they need to articulate it. We fundamentally believe that the disciplines of positioning and branding have gotten stale and that agencies need to provide a better level of competitive advantage to their clients—and that first occurs when you think about the strategic side of the business. We believe the way to make effective, creative advertising is to revisit how you think about it in terms of the company-to-customer relationship.

The opportunity that we have uncovered—and it is the root of our practice—is not to think about the company’s positioning, branding and all the messages we need to bring to market, but to help clients think determine their fundamental role with their customers. We have hit upon a role-based model that gets companies and clients thinking less about their advertising and what to say than about who they really are and how they earn a right to have an ongoing role in their customers’ lives. There is a very different method to our madness here.

In today’s economy, our markets lack value and earnings; I think this is also true in the agency environment. History has shown that earnings and value come not by innovating but by sustained innovation. The advertising industry is long overdue for sustained innovation.