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Aviva is trying to get its hands on a shedload of cash called a 'landed estate' made up of retained profits from some of its investment policies over the past 20 plus years.  A long process of negotiating how much to give to policy holders; how much to give to shareholders and how much to keep back for future payout needs.  The company appointed Claire Spottiswode as the independent voice of the policyholders, calling her an 'advocate'.

This post is not about the work she's been doing (excellent in case you are curious) but the amazingly well handled communications that her office has created via her communications director, Jonathan Haslam .

Working with a complex situation where financial negotiations are being carried on and the general public are not very interested in the detail except where it directly affects their personal policies is a tricky communications brief.

Here's what they have done very well

1. Communicate regularly to the public audience using web, print and email media
2. Provide a full set of links to public websites writing about the negotiations – mainly newspapers
3. Clearly separate the voice of Aviva from the voice of the Advocate

I suspect that concealed behind the communications published are some angry exchanges between the protagonists, some moments of apparently gross unfairness and some mis-interpretations by journalists.  These have never been glossed over – all treated seriously – and clear articulation of the Advocates position has been made.

If you have a services brand would you consider appointing a 'Customer Advocate'?

if you want to use customer loyalty and brand advocates as part of your marketing strategy, having the customers' voice articulated by a named person or team may encourage customers to speak out publicly and can help to align the brand to its audience.
Here's how - 

• Name the person and publicise their appointment
• Make it easy for customers to state their points of view publicly
• Give equal weight to the Advocate's voice as the customer.  This could be a careful graphic design choice showing summaries of forum threads on a home page.
• Enable face to face meetings between customers and the Advocate.

If you are an agency, the particular job of the client advocate would include

• Reviewing marketing communications promises and finding whether past and present clients agree with the statements
• Be on the pitch team as an internal voice to challenge the agency before presenting to the client team
• Undertake the post-pitch analysis and campaign wrap-up review with the client side team
• Have authority / seniority within the agency to make personnel and process changes needed to keep the client satisfied, loyal and repeat business coming

Anyone with experience of creating a customer champion or advocate that can add in some negative points or things to watch out for from both agency and client side?

       
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New business models for Creative Agencies continues to fascinate me.

Seth Godin summarises four elements of a business model or architecture as

 1. What compelling reason exists for people to give you money? (or votes or donations)
   2. How do you acquire what you're selling for less than it costs to sell it?
   3. What structural insulation do you have from relentless commoditization and a price war?
   4. How will strangers find out about the business and decide to become customers?

And so for an agency finding new products to sell alongside the services you already do or investing in your clients' businesses or JVing their new products can be attractive.  This is because these new business ideas come to you in the form of briefs or pitches.  Beware the danger of just going with what comes to you and think through the points 2 and 3 carefully.

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An easy suggestion by Mark Earls from his blog about 'recycling briefs' to support a youth charity.

Of course it's easy to justify re-using stuff if it's for 'charidee' but why not just publish and share?

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Agencies in the UK don't use Web 2.0 for their own marketing.  I started writing on this subject in 2007.  Actually very instructive going back through my archive for references.  Here are the main ones that I found.  Read the research paper exec summary if you do nothing else…

Web adoption rates for agencies (March 2007)

Web 2.0 tools used by agencies research (May 2007) and a copy of the research paper I wrote How agencies are using web 2.0 Research findings

The marketing industry is BAD at marketing itself (October 2007)

This has been re-surveyed by eMarketer (in August 2008) in a new survey with data from 2007 that pretty much bears out my own findings.  Although they only surveyed online marketers not all agencies….

So pretty dire.

But it just reinforces what I wrote yesterday about what clients and brand managers want to see from their agencies – They WANT you using this stuff and showing off your skills.

P.S. A confession.  I found this post in my drafts folder from back in the summer … and ooh, how little has changed.  It's just there is even more data to support my POV now.

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I have just had a conversation with a prospective client, Clive Robinson from Experiential Agency, The Factory Live .

During our chat, I tried hard to check that Clive had established a solid process for business development for his organisation.  It was clear that he has really strong sales skills, the collateral was all in place – but a huge gap was apparent.

The Factory Live team has a great opportunity creation campaign that works well for them producing up to a dozen new leads each week.  But the gap became clear when I asked how many companies they had on their database.  The answer was 25.

For a company that has been trading for two years, producing a dozen leads a week, that's a remarkably low figure.  

We had a short conversation to clarify our terminology and it became clear that all these organisations were being contacted once. 

What a great sales-led opportunity development programme – to get pitches, proposals and new clients all from cold or nearly-cold calling.

This business has a great opportunity to improve its hit rate by setting up three steps of the business development cycle:

• Relationship development
• Creating Opportunities
• Analysis and Feedback 

They do not yet have a database in which to record all the companies with whom they make contact, and to record the conversation and subsequent actions.

Here are my previous posts on database selection for agencies .and the databases summary document

Once this is in place a programme for relationship development can be put in place to keep in touch with these organisations which will lead to improved opportunity creation and hopefully some stunning conversion figures as the database builds up and repeat contact is made and the relationship and company profile built up.

Clive has kindly given me permission to write about our conversation.

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I have returned to facebook recently (to organise our annual Fest and Geeknbury).  It works well.

I forget how many people use it still very intensively.  But, what struck me as interesting was the number of creative agencies advertisign their services there.  They must really believe that businesses with purchasing power employ individuals who use FB….

here's who I found:

ClickyMedia – geo-social marketing (whatever that is!) 

Adstorm – online marketing specialist 

Data2Doormat.com – direct marketing (whose site is offline from the link)

And yesterday I saw Creation Agency (well I think it was them, but the ad's not serving today) 

Well – does it work?

I emailed each agency and will let you know the answers. 

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I have been given sight of the Forrester report "The Connected Agency " Feb 8th 2008.  And it spells gloom and death for the current traditional agency business model.

Definition of a CA is

An agency with a deep understanding of consumer communities, helping brands create and nurture connections, deliver targeted, on-demand messages, and network for talent and insights. 

Key points and the impact on your biz dev methods are:-

• Data – if you aren't deeply into collecting it (audiences as well as prospective clients) start now.  Great databases, good data insight professionals and the means to interrogate with tools like DataCentre.
• Communities – get into the groups online who are talking about your brands, products, clients, marketplaces.  Lurk and read.  Then participate.  Prepare to lead the conversation.  Conversational (closed loop) marketing is the future.  Dialogue, listening, endless conversations not 'campaigns' will be your metrics.
• Analytics – The authors particularly berate the lack of 'left-brain' mathematical and statistical skills in the industry.  These are key to analytics, segmentation and customer insight.  Buy in and develop these skills for your team.
• Stop-Start Campaigns die and continuous customer conversations rule driven by account managers at the heart of the conversational community.  Be prepared to go to your prospective brand clients and demonstrate your connections into their target audiences, what matters to the audience will drive creative not what the agency thinks up.
• So start by knowing the target markets you work in, browse the blogs, forums, message boards and listen carefully.  [If you don't work in a niche, get one.  Fast]
• Use this online audience for research, find your early connectors, mavens, critics, UGC creatives and make friends with them.  Test campaign ideas on them.
• Have your own "private" marketing funnel that can generate early WOM adoption or buzz.  Not got one?  Give me a call.
• Start planning initiatives (not campaigns) to that audience group from a range of brands – who all want the same audience.  Force collaboration among brands but driven by customer needs.
• Beware auctions.  They will grow and the lowest price point will probably win.  If you are not yet offering a low cost solution to your clients, find a way to deliver it.  (ideas: use young staff as training, outsource to lower cost locations [USA? China, India, Australia, NZ] and find ways to use technology to streamline process and use fewer people)

[and they used the word 'nonfungible' that according to my Dictionary doesn't exist!  Now that's leading edge progress.]

 Media planning works on prices driven by the nonfungible metrics of audience, circulation, and page iews, complicating the decision about where marketers should allocate media budgets.

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