Here's why agency-folk have to be the biggest brand ambassadors.

In an industry where people come in for self-actualisation, we sometimes lose our way. We focus on the wrong things. Awards, revenues, bottom lines. What should give us immense happiness is the loyalty we have for the brands we work on, the brands we endorse. David Ogilvy led the way for all “mad men” with his vociferous loyalty to the brands he worked on. The net result is unusually high involvement levels with the inner workings, customer experience, and competition mapping. Here are a few practices that ensure successful engagements:

1. We must visit the clients' facilities as much as possible. Especially the ones where their consumer experiences them. Understand their culture. There is a secret sauce that governs every business and you get a sense of what actually gives your client an edge. Observing the consumers in action presents us the opportunity to gain critical insights with respect to consumer behaviour towards our brand and its competitive set.

2. We must understand the people behind the brand. Getting acquainted with the people behind the brand and constantly getting their perspective on your ideas for them gives us an opportunity for idea-validation. Moreover, you get to orient them on your vision for the brand. Most solutions are born out of these collaborations.

3. We should map the competition's product/service and follow how their communication marries insights into their product/service. Getting their perspective from their communication could help us predict what they could attempt next and what the thought process is currently.

4. We must constantly rate our brand's product against the others in the category and the competition set. This presents yet another opportunity to stay connected to status quo and ground realities.

5. Furthermore, we should get in the shoes of the consumers and experience the brand exactly as they would. We should perform regular "Ghost audits" by disguising as a customer and getting a true, unbiased sense of their preferences and expectations of the brand. We have to get down to the nitty-gritty and assess employees' competency, gauge business efficiency, and monitor the quality of services from the perspective of a customer.

There is no such thing as obsessive behaviour if all it's doing is allowing us to get better at what we do and transform into accountable brand partners!