Why do you need us?
YOU NEED US TO IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS IN RUSSIA, that "mysterious"
(W. Churchill) land of 11 time zones, dozens of peoples and
languages, a huge quilt of mores, religions, buying habits, per-capita
incomes, distribution infrastructures, etc.
We can improve your business in this country because we are a fusion of marketing and advertising
Western expertise, local knowledge and decades of experience.
Strangely enough, all too often many overlook one obvious thing.
Marketing, advertising, PR, and branding are always, repeat always, expensive
in terms of funds, time and other corporate resources. Sometimes these
expenses are formidable. Everybody knows that. But not everybody understands
that marketing, advertising, PR, and branding in their own right are good
for nothing, unless they yield real results, unless they improve your
business.
In the final analysis, improving business means more profits – profits,
not revenue. It will be recalled that profits are revenue minus expenses (costs). That is
to say, that you can get more profits not only by improving your revenue,
but also by cutting your expenses. Here we primarily mean marketing, and
especially advertising, expenses.
Some people seem to have difficulties understanding the simple thing that
if a marketing project brought some additional sales, but the profits
concerned appeared to be smaller than the cost of the project itself,
then the project is stupid. Even more so are projects that decrease your
sales or your stock prices – alas, this is not uncommon!
For instance, if you spend heavily on advertising that only affects your
brand awareness but not the sales curve, do you need that? Think about that.
Or if you waste your money and time (these days time is often more
important than money) on field market research and focus groups and the only
"product" you get are dusty tomes with figures and graphs that, as a wealth
of experience has shown, lead to no productive decisions, then... it's no
result either.
The foregoing underlies our simple philosophy:
Point A – we begin working for you.
Point B – your business improves.
Should there be no point B, then we are no professionals and you do not
need us. But how soon that point B comes depends on each specific case. And on
how productive our cooperation will be. How to improve that productivity?
Some clues are given below.
Our ideal partner (client)
Marketing and advertising services are in a class by themselves – their
quality is not determined solely by the skills and talents of the marketer
and ad maker. Also, to a large extent it is determined by the qualification
and behavior of the receiver of those services. Here is what the advertising
guru David Ogilvy says about clients:
"Clients get the advertising they
deserve... Some behave so
badly that no agency could produce effective advertising for them. Some
behave so well that no agency could fail to do so."
These acerbic words can also be applied to
marketing. Unfortunately, life has given us ample opportunity to see both
species of clients. Both Russian and Western. The only way for marketing and
advertising services to bear fruit is for both parties to become real
partners.
We are not that naive to expect of all our clients sufficient marketing
knowledge for us to immediately plunge into productive cooperation. We
generally spend some time educating them in the elements so that our
discourse would make sense.
Normally, we succeed. Should we fail in that exercise, we wish our
partners all the luck and walk out.
There are no ideals in real life, anyway some idea of The Ideal might be
useful. How do we see our Ideal Partner?
Client-oriented company
To begin with, it's a company that needs our help to become a so-called
"client-oriented" company, i.e., a company with everything in it oriented at
His Majesty the Client. Such a company is normally described by such a
scheme:
The other name for such a company is "client-centric.'
In business, especially with competition as it is now, this philosophy is
the only reasonable philosophy.
How we can become partners
So, you and us must have one and the same task – to improve you business
and, by the end of the day, to give you a bang for the buck. Whether we
succeed or fail, to a significant degree, depends on the
relations that will establish themselves between us. The most
fruitful relations are those of partners, members of a team; relations that
rest on mutual understanding, respect, good will, patience and tolerance.
Also important are discretion and feel for the boundaries of one's
competence.
These qualities are especially needed when assessing projects –
especially dangerous here are whimsical and impulsive decisions.
That's why before we start our cooperation we should agree on the procedure
we should follow when you make your final decision. Normally this agreement
is reached at our first meeting.
Training
Consulting is basically generation of new knowledge and know-how.
This implies constant self-education of the consultant and some training of
his partner-client. We will be unable to consult you properly without you
having at least a minimum level of marketing savvy – otherwise that will
be a dialog of a deaf with a blind. Many clients do not have that
"threshold" level of knowledge. The only way out is to train them.
We ask our Russian clients to read the book "The
Savvy Advertiser" by
Alexander Repiev and some papers. Ideally, some marketing decision-makers
from the client-company become students of our school of marketing,
especially at a three-month course. (Its
syllabus in Word)
Also useful are crash corporate seminars for the company's management.
Dear friends, we do hope that our cooperation
will be not only productive, but also pleasant. You are welcome!
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