Garrand Moehlenkamp: The importance of a brand point of view. Or, why don’t agencies take their own advice?

By Matt Stiker, Chief Marketing (and Nourishing) Officer, Garrand Moehlenkamp

Lost in the hubbub (man, I love that word) around Colin Kaepernick and the new Nike ad are some simple facts about Colin the athlete:

• He was a two-time California all-state baseball player, earning Northern California athlete of the week honors as a pitcher, and was drafted by the Cubs.
•  When he was a senior in high school, his fastball was clocked at 92 mph.

If we learned one thing that we should have already known, whether we’re talking baseballs or brands, it’s that the guy can pitch (wah wah). And say what you will about the ad or his stance on the controversy its created, the point of view he has taken – that Nike has opportunistically and understandably co-opted in order to further burnish their own brand – has gained him no small degree of notoriety.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Portland, and also at their headquarters in southeast Germany not-so-randomly right across town from Puma (long story, another time), the team at adidas has adopted a point-of-view on what is an unarguably less controversial but an arguably even more important topic, a pledge to stop using “virgin” plastic by 2024 in its products, but also in its offices, warehouses, and distribution centers. Hearing that made me proud to have worked there.

The list of companies who believe in what they do – and do what they believe – seems to grow every day. Ben & Jerry’s, Starbucks, REI, Patagonia, Dove, etc., etc. You’ll likely note that these are not small start-ups who can frivolously or on a whim decide that they’re going to support some wacky cause – these are legit global corporations, all with Boards of Directors, shareholders, and thousands of employees who don’t just stand (or kneel) idly by while the junior folks in the marketing department do kooky “creative” things and make silly ads stating that the company will close all their stores on Black-freaking-Friday.

No, these are decisions being made by people who understand the importance of a brand taking, having, and leading with a point-of-view. For most of us who have worked at agencies, that will come as a pretty big “no duh” moment.

And yet.

For some reason, those same agencies that expect their clients to do that mostly don’t treat their own agency brands with that same expectation, and don’t lead with a strong and clear and differentiated point-of-view about who they are, what they stand for, what they believe in, why they’re doing this in the first place.

Before the barrage of “YES WE DO” starts, allow me to head it off at the pass and pull some examples from a variety of agency websites showing how agencies speak about themselves and what they “stand for” – if you look closely, you may just see yourself in here (I’m not joking, I literally copied and pasted most of these from well-known agency sites):

• We embed communications planning, media, and technology into the creative process, which means we solve problems in a modern and smarter way
• We provide an unmatched combination of award-winning creativity, strategic insight and innovation globally, regionally and locally
• Through our integrated world-class capabilities, we help our clients to drive their brand growth across disciplines, media platforms, technologies, languages and geographical boundaries
• People – their wants, needs, motivations and dreams – remain at the center of everything we do today.
• We combine creativity with sound strategy, media effectiveness, data, analytics, and a helping of courage to deliver results for our clients.
• We are creatively driven—and all our work is informed by our culture of collaboration.

Still with me? Just a few more, I promise. I know, I know, it seems pointless to be reading what’s essentially the same thing over and over. Believe me, I know. I read a LOT more than this, you can do it. Just imagine being a client trying to tell the difference between the various agencies they’re considering hiring. Back to it…

• We architect, design and deliver iconic experiences, services and products that improve people’s lives.
• We collaborate with sophisticated clients to deliver a cohesive blueprint across customer connection points that will satisfy audience needs and surpass business goals.
• We are an independent, creatively driven advertising agency that creates strong and provocative relationships between good companies and their customers.
• We are a fully integrated design, advertising, media and production company with a unique business structure that has been called “the model of the future”.

Seen enough? I hate to break it to you, but this is not a point-of-view. This is what you do, it’s a list of services, and that’s exactly what agencies advise ther clients NOT to limit themselves to on their websites, or in their ads. No, we tell them to spend more time talking about who they are and why they do what they do.

And I’ll grant you that I took some creative license to find the most rational statements on these sites, plus I’ll acknowledge that when read without the visual context of design and images, the impact is lessened and any proprietary-ness to the words is lost. But…even with that said, if you repeat the same exercise (and it’s worth doing, just as you would do with your own clients), you’ll see that it’s not easy to find a distinct or clear point of view on many agency sites. There are some out there, but they’re few and far between.

And even those that promise to “put people/the consumer first” have to acknowledge that even that isn’t a real or distinct point-of-view because it’s what EVERYONE ELSE says. If every company put out a message supporting Colin Kaepernick’s right to kneel, if every company decided to stop using virgin plastic, if every company closed their stores on Black Friday, would any of those be considered a distinct or differentiated point-of-view anymore? Would they stand out amongst their competitors, would they generate media coverage?

I’d argue not.

We all know the agency business has changed fundamentally over the last 10 or so years (thanks, Al Gore). And in the scramble to retain business (and revenue, and staff), as business has gone in-house, or away from AOR relationships to projects, many agencies have blindly gone after whatever piece of business happened to appear in front of them, whether from a consultant, or a friend, or a search query, or a conversation in a bar, or at the end of a lengthy, extensive and expensive RFI/RFQ/RFP process. Whatever we can get our hands on we’ll take – without regard to how it changes or impacts the perception of the agency brand we ideally should be protecting and building as much as we do our clients.

Please allow me a slight but relevant digression here.

In 1996, Wieden & Kennedy miraculously won the global Microsoft business. It was a shock to all of us who’d worked there for a while, because that brand didn’t seem to be spiritually or emotionally connected to what the agency did best – but the excitement was such that all were ready to suspend our disbelief and give it a shot. And while I’d argue that the work was better than what many expected – credit to the team on the account for accomplishing what many believed would be impossible – it quickly became apparent that there was a problem of dissonance.

You see, with accounts like Nike, ESPN, Coca-Cola and others, we were all very used to hearing the unequivocal “That’s great work” when we saw concepts or finished creative, but with Microsoft, three very damaging words were then added in the halls that changed how many of us felt about the agency brand. Those words? “For the category.” As in “That’s great work…for the category.” It instantly demeaned the work, made it less than other work we’d seen or done or proudly worked on or been part of. All of a sudden, “great work,” that thing by which we’d been defined for so long, wasn’t unequivocal – it was, in fact, equivocal.

Fast forward to today, and I’m speculating here but I’m thinking there are a whole lot of agencies out there who are doing what they believe is “great work…for the category,” and that deep down in places that they don’t talk about with their colleagues at other agencies much less the trade press, they wish they could drop those last three words off and just get back to doing great work.

To that, I’d suggest they consider taking the advice that they provide to their clients – have a point of view. Allow it to come from a truth. Invest in it. Own it. Make it distinctly yours. And then live it, believe it, and eat drink sleep breathe it.

What does that look like, you ask?

Watch this space.