“Difficult Clients“ was the recent topic of an advertising magazine. Content: small and medium-sized businesses and their relationship to advertising, PR and agencies. Difficult? In the Nuremberg area, advertisers find a distinctly small and medium-sized business landscape. And the need these businesses have to communicate professionally with their target audiences is enormous: increasingly quicker innovation cycles, increasingly similar products, increasingly greater over-stimulation of the consumer or also an increased need for explanations during reorganizations – these are only a few of the many related issues.
In fact, it is a situation in which small and medium-sized businesses and the regional communications industry should seek and find each other – especially since many businesses prefer short distances and like to look for partners in their immediate surroundings. Why, in spite of this, do many small and medium-sized businesses have an ambivalent relationship to advertising and PR agencies? And why, on the other hand, do many agencies have the feeling that they are spinning their wheels with their ideas?
As is often the case, the success of the collaboration between businesses and agencies is based upon how the two match up culturally. And, precisely in this regard, there is great potential for misunderstandings. A long-term, flourishing collaboration for both sides therefore requires adherence to several basic rules:
- A common understanding of the client’s business. It is precisely the small and medium-sized businesses that often identify extremely closely with their structures and evolved culture – often to the extent that the importance of communication for the product’s success is underestimated. An agency will understand this culture only if it makes an in-depth study of the client’s subject matter, markets, goals and target groups – only if it genuinely gets immersed in the world of the small or medium-sized business. This is especially true if businesses and their market orientation change. In such cases, an “advertising flyer designer” is no longer able to help. Only an agency that has the resources to be a strategic advisor can be of assistance.
- A common language. Agencies that flood their clients with incomprehensible advertising jargon have understood neither their consulting task nor the needs of their clients. And measures that actually go beyond the communications needs of their clients are not more correct because they use “hip” English terms.
- A common awareness for healthy economies. A small or medium-sized business in particular will want to invest its hard-earned money as selectively as possible – in ways that it is convinced will be successful. This requires the agency’s subject-related consulting expertise, which should seek and take innovative paths that avoid the usual standards (from cinema commercials to participation in trade shows). The contracting company should be able to expect this from “the creative party.”
- The intention to work together in the future. A strict client-contractor relationship hardly ever suffices for this. Agencies that identify with the goals of their clients and their clients’ business sectors are in demand as active participants. There are enough forums, the latest example being the recently founded Deutsche Genossenschaft zur Förderung des Mittelstands eG (DGFM, Nuremberg) [German Cooperative for the Promotion of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses], which also provides a marketing/communications working group for its members – precisely for the purpose of linking up partners and solutions suitable for small and medium-sized businesses.
The upshot is that the small or medium-sized business wants and needs communications partners, but it does not want a partner that builds castles in the air. It wants advice and can certainly be convinced that the importance of communication for the success or failure of its products cannot be overestimated – but it wishes to do this by having its own competence and marketing experience respected. Small and medium-sized businesses and agencies each have fascinating expertise in their own areas. When they merge the two areas of knowledge and skillfully close the interface, a long-lasting collaboration can evolve which is extremely successful for both parties.
Publication in IHK-Magazin 10/2004
The author, Bernhard Pluskwik, is a Managing Board member and Partner of gernBotschaft Gesellschaft für Kommunikation (Fürth). gernBotschaft is a member of the Deutsche Genossenschaft zur Förderung des Mittelstandes eG (Nuremberg) (German Association for the Promotion of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses).
