Advertising ...the art of Client Agency Relationships... part 4

For the bliss ful state, the professionals in this industy should actually and with full courage do some introspection as to what the other party expects. Here is what ,generally the client expects and is named ,the elements of the client expectation pentagon.......

Competence
Czars
Chronicles
Compatibility
Culture

To see them in detail, one by one....

what is Competence?

Creative competence, account planning and research acumen and the drive to excel are what clients look for as a basic requirement in its communication partner. The customer perception about poor networking that Hutch offered was tactfully handled by O & M with the now famous pug and the boy. Had it been an agency with less creative and account planning competence, India would have been bored with maps and dotted lines to display networks.
Good clients appreciate good work. They aren’t hesitant to be proud of their agencies’ competence -Creative and otherwise. Randal Rothenberg in his classic ‘Where The Suckers Moon’ has suggested that the success of the Volkswagen campaign probably changed the rules of the advertising business. Agencies, he claims, “were no longer punished for being argumentative and using once forbidden formulae, a great wave of originality engulfed the profession and changed client agency relation” Today research is a key area and iceberg researches strictly won’t do. Agencies are expected to recognize that best and effective of creatives are a result of good research and customer insights so gained. Agencies should also acquire knowledge continuously and analyze information not to confirm what is already known but to discover what is not according to Subhas Ghosal.....
Many times ad agencies and their creatives fail to connect to the target audience they have to connect. For instance, advertising to women, ‘even by an authorized agency study in the West proves that, in many a situation isn’t working either due to simple laziness or stereotyping’ (www.peurtorico-herald.org). Forget converting Client Agency Relationships to that blissful state, it can only be the easy formula for disaster.....

To be continued......