Understand Your Clients' Beliefs Before Their Business

When working with a new client, or pitching for one, the first thing a consultancy or agency will traditionally do is schedule a “getting to know the business” meeting. You know the drill: some sales numbers, some consumer research, maybe there’s a consumer segmentation in there, a peak at some of the product or service innovation that’s in the works. Someone at the agency, thinking they are demonstrating some deep personal empathy will ask the client “what’s keeping you up at night?”. Good one Oprah.

But there’s a very different kind of meeting I think agencies should prioritize first. One that will have an equally if not greater impact on the quality of the relationship and in turn, the quality of the work. Let’s call it the Shared Beliefs Meeting and its purpose is to understand how the clients believe things like brands, advertising, design and so on actually work.

This is a thorough debate about how people form ideas and opinions about brands, how are those opinions stored in people’s brains and how does whatever they store inform buying decisions. If you’re an ad agency, it's also about what each party thinks is the role of advertising, how people decode it and what therefore makes for successful advertising. It's the kind of conversation that would tackle foundational questions like:

Do you think people primarily evaluate brands on a cost/value basis?

Or do you think people primarily choose brands based on how they add to or reinforce their self-image?

Do people evaluate brands on how well they deliver on the broad category benefits vs competitors?

How does advertising generally influence brand choice?

Should advertising land a brand promise or a product benefit? Or both? Or something else? Do they believe in last-click attribution, NPS, Purpose, loyalty?

…and so on. You will focus the questions on what’s most germane to the work you will do with them. The point of the meeting is to find out where you agree, where you disagree and how you can then find common ground going forward.

This meeting is vital because the likely assumption from both sides though is that everybody thinks the same about all these things. That actually, there’s no discussion really needed to be had.?

But not only is it very unlikely the client and the agency think the same about these things, it’s also very unlikely that even the clients all agree with each other, or all the agency people do.

What’s more, a lot of people only have a loose intuitive sense of their own beliefs here and I know very few agencies who have bothered to define a cogent set of answers to these questions that everyone in the agency is able to articulate in unison.

And here’s the problem - sooner or later, you’re going to have to reckon with these questions. And when it happens, they won’t be in the form of some academic debate. They’ll be in the form of the client not liking your recommended brand strategy. Or them not agreeing with your creative approach. Or with your proposed logo. Or the tagline.

And the irony is, if you blame yourself, you’ll think it’s because you don’t understand their business sufficiently. Or (as is more common) if you blame the client, it will be because you believe they aren’t adhering to the rules of “how brands work” or “how advertising works”.

But you never agreed on what those rules were. And now it’s too late to have this discussion because deadlines are looming and everyone is looking to lock something down soon.

Maybe you will start to intuitively understand each other the longer you work together. But these days, relationships don’t last long enough for that to happen and after a couple of years of feeling slightly frustrated with each other, the client will move in the hope they'll find someone who they are more in sync with.

Of course, in pitches, we have something that ostensibly fulfills this role: the Chemistry Meeting. But those meetings are too often just a creds presentation with 10 mins at the end to ask some questions, all while hoping the client likes you and your work. That isn’t indicative of chemistry. Chemistry is about whether you see the world in similar ways; whether you share beliefs.

Whether personal or professional, it is widely understood that the basis of great relationships is shared values and beliefs. Your opportunity to establish those is at the beginning of the relationship, not when you’re deep in the work. Otherwise, as in all dysfunctional relationships, in all your conversations and debates thereafter, you’ll be talking not to each other, but past each other.