When the answer comes before the question.
This sentence has stuck with me for a long time (thanks Nick Morgan):
“When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
In the current climate, this sentence seems to apply more than ever within our industry. It’s across not just branding, but marketing, digital, performance, social, strategy and pretty much every other agency discipline - and having sat on both sides of the table as both a client and agency owner, you can see it a mile off.
Yes, we all have things we are good at, things that we specialise in and hang our hat on. We have our processes, our methodologies, our experiences and, understandably, the things we believe work using our unique skill sets, as people and marketeers.
The problem comes when those things become the answer, even before we’ve properly understood the question.
A business has a commercial problem and suddenly it needs a rebrand. Another needs more leads and the answer is performance marketing. Someone else needs to improve their customer journey and suddenly there’s a new digital platform on the table. Not to mention AI and how everyone can now improve your business efficiencies with the wave of a wand.
Sometimes those are exactly the right answers, but sometimes they’re simply the things the agency knows how to sell. And they sell them well.
There’s a growing pressure on agencies and marketers to stay relevant. This is neither about learning, nor development. Neither is it always about a new platform, methodology or technology. People are simply selling the wrong things to clients, because this is what they know.
Nobody wants to look like they’re standing still, so we look for ways to show how we’re moving forward. But somewhere along the way, staying relevant can become more important than being useful.
This is where self-preservation comes in. Yes, we all need to win work, people need to justify their roles and businesses need to keep growing. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when protecting our own relevance starts to influence the advice we give, the client becomes the one who loses out. We sell what we do, rather than asking whether it is going to make a difference to the business.
How often do very different businesses end up going through the same exercises purely because that’s what a ‘consultant’ knows? The same workshops, the same strategic frameworks, the same positioning exercises, the same campaign planning and often, eventually, the same outputs. There is of course value in having a proven process, we all have at least one. But a process should be a tool, not an outcome.
One of the hardest (but most powerful) things for an agency to say is “You don't need us.” And whilst it doesn’t help pay the overheads, sometimes it’s the right thing to say.
Agency experience and expertise are valuable, but these should help us ask better questions, not give us permission to jump straight to the answer.
The starting point should always be the business: what is it trying to achieve and can we make a difference? Only then we can work out what role we need to play. Sometimes that may be what we do well. Sometimes it may mean bringing somebody in to work with us. And sometimes it might mean doing nothing at all.
I think there’s a difference between being relevant and being useful. Relevance is about keeping up; usefulness is about making a difference. The industry will continue to change, and there will always be new tools, channels and ways of doing things. We should absolutely embrace that. But perhaps we don't need to prove that we know everything. Perhaps we just need to get better at knowing what matters and being honest about whether we can make that happen.
Our clients don't care how clever our methodology is, what diagram we show them or what jargon we use. They care whether we have helped them achieve what they needed to achieve. This should be the measure we hold ourselves to.
It shouldn’t be about whether we sold the project, used the latest process or looked relevant, but whether we did the right thing, even when the right thing for that client may not be the thing we usually do.
Maybe the real skill isn't about always being a hammer - it’s maybe knowing when to put the hammer down?
Jamie Kelly
