Rebranding an agency is a fraught process. We have just done it. What did we learn and what does it mean for our clients?
Most creatives will tell you rebranding your own agency is the worst job you can be tasked with. Asking a bunch of creative and marketing experts to decide on one authentic and memorable brand for themselves? It’s Fight Club territory and the tension in the process can be palpable.
Yakkazoo, as you can see from this shiny new website, has just been on that journey. What did we learn, where was the blood split and what were the parallels with how we service our clients?
It will take way longer than you hope, and that’s a good thing.
Client work always comes first. So like the plumber with the leaking taps at home, we worked on this between the paying jobs. Was that the right course to take? No. And yes.
No, because we should treat it like any other project, set a deadline and just do it. Yes, because our clients always must come first, so we should solve their problems before our own. But also yes because like any good client engagement, we set out to discover along the way what we are really selling here, and in that process questions are raised that need answers. And those answers can take some time, and soul searching, to answer.
We raised lots of questions and in answering learnt alot about our market, our capabilities and how our dreams align with them. With our clients this also should be the case – recognising that sometimes you have to say no, let’s hold here, go back and seek more answers.
Look outside and in the mirror at the same time.
We had to take a good long look at what our market needs and what our capabilities are before we decided on our positioning. By matching the needs that CMOs are facing now with our capabilities and operations we were able to find our sweet spot, one that we can authentically say we are very good at and that it can help our clients.
That sweet spot was around a more consultative approach to what has been the traditional agency model. CMOs first and foremost want sound advice, from people with experience. We have that and identified a way to rework our operations model to meet that need while also offering a nimble, flexible offering of traditional agency capabilities. This means that our clients can engage with us on their terms, to get what they need, when they need it, and nothing more. We pride ourselves on having a deeper understanding of business and we have proven that when those skills are engaged, our clients get a better ROI from us.
A promise must mean something to you before it will mean anything to others.
With the model decided we went back to our values to help anchor our positioning. As a team we decided a year or so back that we were Brave Explorers, Loyal Companions and Passionate Storytellers. We regularly identify when we have brought those values to life. So our new positioning and our tagline needed to reflect those values while also talking to the new model we are developing. The business model provided direction but the values gave us the destination: ‘Go beyond’.
‘Go beyond’ talks about our desire to step outside of the agency model, to blend high street consultancy with agency capabilities and provide businesses with more – more experienced advice, more flexibility, more ways of engaging and less frustration, complexity and costs. We want to go beyond what businesses expect an agency to deliver and what results they might expect.
‘Go beyond’ is also a way we operate in all of our roles. Our designers aim to go beyond the expected design approach and find new ways to engage visually while being true to the brand. Our media team are experts in looking past the usual media solutions to find low cost, high return ways to reach difficult audiences. And our Client Solutions and Strategy teams look deeper into the data to find those golden nuggets of truth that our creatives can forge into campaign jewels. Going beyond is what we strive for, so that makes a brand promise we can share with pride.
Know when to say no, and why.
Back to my opening paragraph, this can be a fraught process. We have lots of highly experienced people who had input to our rebranding. They have opinions, strong ones. To ensure we didn’t go around in too many circles we always looked back at our market and their needs. You have to, often, view those needs through the lens of your capabilities – what can you really offer businesses to meet their needs and how that can be communicated to them.
This becomes your yardstick and it’s a process we are very familiar with. In experiences, a large part of my background, we use ‘Feel, Think, Know, Do’ upfront to set expectations on what an experience should deliver for the attendees. Everything we do after that is checked back against that work. The same goes here. We must use yardsticks of expected outcomes for our market to check our own opinions against, and do it often. This is why our new brand has taken far longer than we would have liked, but the result is one we are far prouder of.
One of the most disheartening things you can do in advertising is work on brands that are trying to communicate without authenticity. Through our rebranding we have learnt and demonstrated that our vision and mission are true to our values and abilities. So here we are. A shiny new logo, website and a new promise but one that is anchored in an old determination to go beyond what we expect of ourselves, for our clients.
Grant Whitehouse
Head of Strategy