How does 'the service brand agency' manage its own brand and communications?
Imagine you are a marketing communications agency positioned as the specialist in the service sector.
You regularly counsel clients on the importance of brand consistency throughout the communications repertoire (‘…from the most basic contact letter right through to brand advertising…’).You emphasise the vital need to deliver a customer experience that matches the brand proposition.You assert that this can only be achieved by recognising that internal culture and communications are as important as external.And you insist on the absolute necessity for the brand to be championed from the highest point of the organisation.
How do you then manage your own Service Brand?
Two opening comments. One: we are genuinely committed to becoming exemplars of good service brand management and communications. Two: we’re not there yet. And – if we’re honest – we don’t expect to be for some time: if you’re reasonably serious about what you do, you’ll inevitably see room for improvement.
Managing our Brand
We established CCHM’s brand positioning as THE SERVICE BRAND AGENCY back in 1997, but we’ve been refining it ever since.We’ve conducted research among senior marketing people from both service and manufactured goods sectors to better understand their comparative needs and to refine our business model.We stage regular management and team workshops to wrestle with the definition and delivery of what we do, and we also use external moderators to research ‘warts and all’ team perceptions of our Brand Pyramid compared with the idealised one in the minds of our senior management.
This isn’t, it has to be said, a particularly comfortable experience but it’s a very necessary one.
Touching base with the customer experience through client research is, of course, vital, although it is not always easy to gain a rounded picture.
Any failings in service delivery can sometimes be overlooked in the (usually brief) euphoria of exciting new creative work or, conversely, consistently good service may not seem important if, at that time, we are having difficulty in cracking a difficult creative challenge. (If this suggests we’re not perfect, we can only acknowledge that’s true. Not many agencies are.) Our induction process for all new staff includes an explanation of our Brand Platform and how they can contribute to it. Our brand champion is CCHM Chairman Lucian Camp. He originally conceived the agency positioning and therefore also takes a very keen interest in the management of the agency brand, with very full support from across the Board.
Marketing communications
Our principal external communications’ tools are this publication, The Invisible Brand (now in its third year), our website www.cchm.co.uk our AAR showreel, media relations, highly targeted direct marketing (online as well as offline) and public speaking.
Creatively, all our communications subscribe to a common executional theme of ‘making the invisible visible’ and our website uses a fair amount of intuitive interactivity to provide a strong flavour of the CCHM experience, rather than just presenting facts or examples of work.We are very vigilant about how (and how consistently) we evoke the CCHM brand in our work.
Our internal communications are, by definition, rather different.We make a management presentation twice a year to the full team, setting out our financial progress against targets, our new business strategy, our pitch wins and losses, and the key structural and branding issues we are seeking to address.We also aim to throw in a certain amount of levity, keep the presentation short and use the drinks session afterwards to answer the questions that people don’t like asking in front of the whole audience.We also have a regular monthly ‘second Thursday’ evening get-together where we provide informal updates, show new work and socialise.
Delivering against the proposition
As every service business knows, this really is the hard part and, we suspect, particularly so in a business that has to project a strong corporate culture on the one hand, whilst giving full rein to individual talent and self-expression on the other. CCHM is an unusual agency in that we really do expect our people to pay as much attention to the quality and brand literacy of a customer service letter as they do to a TV campaign or a brand development project. (Nobody is suggesting this is anything like as much fun, or that it will necessarily take as much time, but it must be treated with equal respect.) Generally, people joining CCHM come from a background where life had pretty much revolved around one discipline, such as advertising or direct marketing. Our challenge is to identify and recruit capable people who are also open and versatile so they can address the more complex needs of service brand communications.
Another recruitment issue is the proper representation of sector skills. By far the largest services sector is financial services, where a thorough understanding of technical and regulatory matters, as well as market expertise and consumer insight, are all fundamental to the quality of our strategic and creative thinking.
The all-important ‘people factor’ is, of course, complemented by well-developed processes and procedures for how we all interact and maintain standards.
This extends beyond how we work together into how we work with our clients. All new clients receive a CCHMWelcome Pack that provides a ‘rough guide’ to the agency and how they can get the best out of it.
Do we have a successful formula? There is undoubtedly some truth in the adage about half your advertising working but not knowing which half, not least in the B2B area where we operate with a range of communications tools designed to work together, but only some of which are directly measurable.
So we continue to finesse our strategy (just as we advise our clients to do) and we continue to agonise as to whether we’re spending our budget as cannily as we might (as most clients do). We’re always exploring fresh ways of delivering a better customer experience for our clients and a more enjoyable and stimulating environment for our team – a process that’s never likely to stop. How do we rate all this?
Branding and positioning maybe 8/10; marcoms strategy perhaps 7/10; delivery (let’s be honest here) 6 on a bad day, 10 on a very good one.
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