In an industry where clarity of purpose is everything, agencies must better define what makes them truly valuable, writes Gareth Davies, UK group CEO of Leagas Delaney.
The year is 1992, and Bill Clinton is running for the US Presidency. James Carville, a strategist working on his campaign team, has defined three ‘rules’ to help the Clinton team to stay on-message. In an attempt to hardwire these rules into the team, Carville decided to write them down and hang them on the wall of their campaign HQ in Little Rock, Arkansas. Each rule was a pithy, reductive reminder of a topic that he hoped would connect with the electorate.
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Although the topics were most definitely intended for public consumption, the rules – as written by Carville – were not. However, the second one in particular escaped from Little Rock, caught the imagination of commentators, and became the de facto slogan for the Clinton campaign. In the chaos of competing electoral agendas and slogans, ‘The economy, stupid’ (later prefixed with ‘It’s…’) struck an unusually resonant chord.
Why? Because it defined the main agenda topic succinctly but also because its tone was fresh and undeniable. The inclusion of the word ‘stupid’ gave it a different energy. All of a sudden, the message became clear and urgent. It summed up perfectly the change that Clinton wanted to deliver set against the recessionary backdrop overseen by presidential incumbent George H. W. Bush.
In countless elections since, the rule has become a snowclone, rephrased and repurposed, replacing the word ‘economy’ to reflect the zeitgeist ie ‘It’s the deficit, stupid’. Or, in cases where the economy remains the prevailing issue, the rule is simply dusted down and left untouched (shoutout to last week’s UK GDP data).
Why the trip down the memory lane of political campaigning, you may reasonably ask?
Well, because in our fast-changing marcomms landscape, every creative agency needs its own rules, its own way of succinctly defining its key messages. In recent weeks, I’ve spoken to a number of creative agency leaders, many of whom have told me that they are looking to sharpen their offer. Their aim? To be clearer on who they are and how their proposition will evolve to meet the likely needs of the modern marketer.
At the heart of all of this is a Carville-esque rule that we can all follow: ‘It’s the Buyer Value Equation, (stupid).’ The Buyer Value Equation (BVE) is a concept used to quantify the value proposition that a product or service offers to potential buyers. Evidently, the clearer – and more distinct – your BVE, the more likely it will be easily understood, and (assuming it is relevant) bought.
Last week, writing for The Drum, David Bain (the former Founding Partner at BMB) spoke of the importance of expertise over experience. Bain was making the case for individuals defining their own value, but the point is equally resonant for agencies. What you’ve done in the past is of consequence - of course it is - but how you apply that experience is your expertise.
For agencies, and for the clients that buy their expertise, this is vital. I once left a meeting with Tim Delaney, the eponymous founder of Leagas Delaney. He pulled me aside and said, “If we get this wrong, we’re in danger of just becoming their advertising agency”.
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Nothing wrong with that of course but the point he was trying to make was that our Buyer Value Equation was different to that of other agencies. Our clients expected senior counsel on broader issues beyond communications. Not delivering on our BVE would represent a failure on our part and in the eyes of our clients, who expected a particular type of relationship.
Thankfully, in this case, we didn’t get it wrong, we got it right. But it was a salutary lesson in knowing yourself, your Buyer Value Equation and the foundations on which agency and client partnerships are built and sustained. When any of us get this wrong, when we misunderstand who we are and what our clients expect from us, we fail.
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A lesson for me, for sure, but perhaps one for all of us too? In a future reimagined by technology, we will all have to revisit our Buyer Value Equations and be certain that they are fit for us, our ambitions and for our clients. After all, it would be stupid not to.