I recently got in a debate with someone about the definition of a good idea.
While we were in agreement that it had to be something that quantifiably – and positively – affected business, we were in disagreement about whether that was all that mattered.
In short, she thought it was and I thought it wasn’t.
You see my perspective is that increasing sales is pretty easy … especially if you can play with elements such as price, promotion or distribution … the hard part is achieving this growth while maintaining, enhancing or building the brands meaning, value &/or reputation and ultimately, that is why companies pay agencies a shit load of money.
Now of course, it could be argued that the way many agencies approach their work means it’s completely contrary to this – just like it could be argued that many clients are so short-term focused that the only thing they care about is the cash rather than the brands value [though that’s because they think a brand is only made up of a name, a font, a template and a couple of corporate colours] … and while there are definitely some agencies/clients who fall into this trap, there are still a hell of a lot who don’t … however if adland ignores the importance of ‘what you say and how you say it’ in favour of purely promoting the shortcut to profit, then we will continue to create our own decline and irrelevance.
Don’t get me wrong, I still believe profit is sanity and turnover/awareness is vanity … however great ideas and business commerciality are not mutually exclusive and if you do it right – which means embracing channels such as retail, packaging, NPD, DM and yes, even sales promotion etc etc – you can build better profits and value for today as well as a healthier future for tomorrow.
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