by Alistair Mokoena (@AlistairMokoena) One of the challenges of running an agency is getting to know your clients intimately. Knowing their business is a fairly easy thing to get right; knowing your clients (and their inner circles) well is harder. And your clients’ inner circles hold a lot of answers to many questions.
Meeting the inner circle
A lot has been written about the tell-tale signs of a man or woman in love, one of which is when he or she invites you to meet their inner circle — their friends and family. This always comes as a surprise and leaves you wondering if this is a sign of how serious your partner is about you, or whether he or she just wants a second opinion of you.
Until that moment arrives, you aren’t sure what to expect and what to think. Your mind starts wondering: Will they like me? What has she told them about me? What do they like to talk about? Whom do they admire in the world and, more importantly, will they approve of me?
Opportunity
Instead of agonising about how your first date with your partner’s inner circle will go, how about using the date as an opportunity to get to know more about your partner through the eyes of those that are close to him or her?
In other words, instead of seeing this as a one-way panel interview, flip the script and use the date with her inner circle to gather insights about your partner.
This approach has two benefits:
- It puts you in a position of power instead of victim mode, and
- Your curiousity will signal to others just how serious you are about getting to know your partner better.
There’s nothing more attractive than a partner who is interested in knowing the “you of you,” so they can better meet your relationship needs.
Running an agency
One of the challenges of running an agency is getting to know your clients intimately.
Knowing their business is a fairly easy thing to get right. Most of what you need to know about your client’s business is codified in its mission statement, its value system, its business plans, previous research, competitor analyses… the list goes on.
Knowing your clients well is harder:
- None of it is written. You figure it out as you go.
- We don’t spend nearly as much time interacting and socialising with our clients as we perhaps should.
- Most people have a work persona and a home persona, so you never quite know what you don’t know about them. It is this blind spot that makes knowing your client’s inner circle important.
Answers to questions
Your client’s inner circle holds a lot of answers to questions such as: What drives my client? What are their fears and dreams? Whom do they admire? Whose opinion do they value most? What makes them feel like a rock star and what steals their joy?
And a question that’s on every advertising professional’s mind is: What advertising appeals to this inner circle?
Let’s face it: we all wanna be rock stars in the eyes of our kids, partners, family and friends. We love it when members of our inner circle congratulate us on an ad we’ve just shot. We hate it when they go on about other agencies’ advertising. We want to make ads that they love so they can keep giving us some love.
Entertain the possibility
Before you start protesting that the inner circle isn’t your target market, entertain the possibility that the views of your client’s inner circle might just be representative of the views of your target market. If these people who are close to your client think that the Wonga ads are funny, then maybe that’s what South Africans like.
We’ve all received an email from a client on a Monday morning telling us about advertising insights they picked up at a braai with friends or at a family dinner. That email usually ends with: “Why don’t we make ads like that?”
What the client is really saying is: “The people whose opinion I respect, and whose admiration I desire, think those ads are cool and I’d like for them to say that about our advertising.”
Most of us dismiss this “sample of six” research by either pointing out the fault with other people’s advertising or by defending our own work — instead of probing what makes this advertising a hit with the inner circle.
Case in point
A case in point is FNB’s “Steve” campaign. Some were quick to dismiss it as irritating and repetitive instead of learning a few things about how to disrupt a market by provoking dissatisfaction with the status quo. The results proved us wrong. That campaign did wonders for FNB’s book.
I’m not for a second saying we should abandon our sense of judgment as advertising professionals and bow to everything clients say, but there’s a lot we can learn about how to win with our clients by exposing ourselves to their inner circle.
And I’m using the word “win” in the broadest sense. We have to win with both the client and the consumer.
Goes without saying
It goes without saying that the advertising has to be relevant and appropriate to the brand and to the target market, but the techniques we employ, the style we adopt, the language we use and all other tricks of the trade which I’m not going to give away can be influenced by what the inner circle says works.
So the next time my client invites me to a braai with his or her mates, I’ll be there. Not like a bear, but like an ethnographic spotter, looking for insights into what South Africans love.
Alistair Mokoena (@AlistairMokoena) is a Unilever-trained Chartered Marketer with lots of blue-chip marketing experience. He’s currently MD of Draftfcb Joburg. Mokoena contributes the monthly “The Switch” column to MarkLives.com.
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