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Towards
a Collaborative Approach
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TOWARDS
A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH…
Sam Balsara charts out the evolution of client-agency
relationship and offers his perspective on how cohesive
approach can lead the whole to be bigger than the
sum of its parts. |
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An
essential principle of management has always been
to focus on deri-ving synergestic benefits from combining
two different elements; how to make 1+1=not, 2 but
11.
Of late something is going wrong in our domain area
(advertising) and there are less and less examples
of 1+1 becoming 11 and sometimes not even 2.
One would like to believe that today’s ad agency
has come a long way, where it is a complex structure
offering a plethora of services often overlapping,
often competing internally. But has it? How did it
evolve at the turn of the century.
The newspaper had space to sell; the manufacturer
recognised the need to make his product known among
many prospective customers, but neither was equipped,
to intelligently fill up the blank space of the newspaper.
Enter the Agent, initially appointed by the newspaper
to sell his space and collect money on his behalf.
Man has an amazing ability to complicate things and
ultimately reduce efficiency. And the client-agency
relationship has not been spared.
The earliest relationship was simple, clean and roles
were clearly defined. The manufacturer knew what his
product could do and could not do. The agency took
that as the starting point, added a bit of knowledge
about consumer behaviour and used its ‘art’
skills in copy and designing to develop an ad. It
was simple, efficient and clean and more often than
not, it worked. As the stakes increased, and so did
the advertiser’s scale of operations and his
profits, the manufacturer felt that ‘market’
and ‘consumer’ knowledge was critically
important and too important to be outsourced. The
Agency on the other hand, to occupy a higher intellectual
slot and become more competitive in the market place
and more attractive to the advertiser started hiring
account planners, and researchers and developing its
expertise in this area and offered it free of cost
to the advertiser. What happened is a blurring of
roles, an overlap of roles, perhaps a lot of work
and points of view that could be counter productive
or at best, a lot of duplication.
In the current Indian scenario it is now recognised
that a new breed of first generation FMCG manufacturers
have emerged who seem to be more successful than traditional
multinationals or large Indian Companies who, just
a few years ago almost exclusively owned the large
and growing FMCG market. Several factors obviously
have contributed to the latter’s success, but
could one of these factors be that they concentrate
on the product and its liability and leave the Positioning
and Creative entirely to the agency or an experienced
advertising person. Going by the gains made by this
breed of entrepreneurs and their ability offer value
for money products in the market place, it would appear
that their model is sound and can work efficiently.
Perhaps over a few generations these businesses because
of their success, will grow fat, professionalise,
based on the advice of fancy management consultants
or foreign university professors and ape the established
companies, to soon see themselves being overtaken
by another breed of entrepreneurs who will appear
on the scene and use the very same model they used
in their early days.
Having said that, let me also state that the systems
and processes we now have in place have evolved over
a long period of time and are probably not going to
go away in a hurry. So it is perhaps more practical
to drive efficiency into them by eliminating waste
and duplication rather than discard them entirely.
The corner stones of an effective advertising campaign
are product knowledge, market knowledge, consumer
knowledge and communication skills at the strategic
and craft level. I would like to submit that the first
two should remain the responsibility of the manufacturer
and the latter two that of the agency. The temptation
to do the other man’s job or interfere in it
should be resisted at all costs. This is possible
if there is mutual respect for each other’s domain
knowledge, integrity and application skills.
I’d like to illustrate the above with a few examples,
from my own agency. Whisper is a brand of sanitary
napkin, a global brand created by Procter & Gamble
based on the belief that a woman would go to any extent
to use and adopt a product, that keeps her clean and
dry on all days and that will prevent accidents in
terms of staining. One could assume these benefits
would be appreciated and responded to by all women
all over the world. And sitting in a Western capital
or even in a South Bombay ivory tower, this would
appear to be so. But add to this the fact that Whisper
was 40 percent more premium priced than its nearest
competitor, which was already considered expensive
and that majority of women in India don’t so
readily indulge in personal products as men do on
cigarettes and whisky and you have a problem on hand.
Working with the company’s R&D and product
teams and consumer insights gained through first hand
research by agency executive (not research-agency
research) a campaign idea emerged of “2 v/s 1”
i.e. 1 Whisper could absorb more than 2 ordinary napkins.
Add to this the power of a simple but effective demo
(that initially affected the sensibilities of Doordarshan
officials) and Whisper began to notch market share
gains month after month. This was in 1996.
Another example is that of Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri,
a jewellery store in Mumbai at Zaveri Bazar. As is
common in business families in the second or third
generation, each nuclear family wants to go its own
way and operate independently and each cannot be denied
the right to use his name or his family name for the
business. In the case in point, four jewellery stores
operated in the same city with essentially the same
name. Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri, the store at Zaveri
Bazaar, the first and original store felt that over
decades the name had become synonymous with quality
jewellery in the city and offered trust, a vital requirement
in the successful marketing of jewellery. On the other
hand, consumer feedback was that consumers thought
that all stores were under a common management, and
therefore should be offering a standard quality fare.
In actual fact, each had a different offering in terms
of design, quality, etc. Blending of these two pieces
of knowledge led to the creation of a new identity
for TBZ, Zaveri Bazar, as TBZ - the Original, and
a provocative campaign to announce the identity change
was launched.
Yet another example that comes to mind is that of
Cinthol Fresh, a line extension of Cinthol Lime in
the 4-times larger ‘popular’ segment of
the toilet soap market. Client’s domain expertise
was clearly the manufacture of quality soaps. Whilst
the market was conventionally segmented as popular
and premium, consumer behaviour studies established
that a substantial number of households bought a basket
of premium and popular soaps. For Godrej to expand
its volume, it was clear that an entry would have
to be made in the ‘popular’ segment and
given the fact that Cinthol Lime earlier launched
was a huge success and the overall do-good associations
of lime in the Indian consumer’s mind, the candidate
chosen was a line extension of Cinthol in the ‘popular’
segment, named Cinthol Fresh with the proposition
‘A lime soap at a popular price’. Conventional
wisdom in both marketing and advertising circles dictated
that the price and especially so, if its low should
never be specified boldly in the communication. The
launch TV commercial turned this conventional wisdom
on its head and did exactly that - splash the price
Rs. 6.50 in a frame filling bold type face, something
that consumers appreciated and lapped up as proven
subsequently by sales figures which showed a 100 percent
increase in total Cinthol franchise in less than a
year of launch of Cinthol Fresh.
In recognition of the doctrine advocated by the title
of this article many MNCs have now internalised the
mantra ‘Think Global, Act Local’. A foremost
example of this is Coca-Cola which made astonishing
gains only when it radically changed its approach
by connecting with audiences using the Indian idiom.
This thinking should not necessarily be restricted
to Strategy and Creative and can work effectively
in the Media area too. A lot is made internationally
of the ‘recency’ approach but the same needs
to be tempered with local insights to evolve an effective
media strategy.
Conversely, there are enough examples in the Indian
Market when agencies using their star status intimidate
clients into accepting a creative route that completely
ignores client’s domain knowledge and as many
or more, where pompous clients living in rarefied
air, refuse to listen to the voice of the consumer,
overawed by the strength of their own product idea
or consumer proposition. But I must confess, I am
chickening out of stating some examples that readily
come to mind.
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