Relationship Bank Accounts Pay Dividends
Infusing Love and Respect into client-creative relationships can seem like a warm and fuzzy sounding missive. But just how important to the branding and marketing equation is it? According to us, it’s pretty much right up there with learning to get along with your mother-in-law.
What’s Love Got To Do With It? Just about everything.
Over 30 years of working alongside some pretty eclectic and enterprising business minds and personalities, we’ve learned a thing or two about getting along. At the end of the day we’ve simply rediscovered something enduring and timeless. It really does come down to love.
Nurturing client love and respect, while pushing the bounds of imagination and creativity is certainly not for the faint of heart. To be on the cutting edge of messaging and marketing, while building consensus and confidence through the conceptual process, takes a generous balance of both guts and well-appointed candor. That fine and delicate precipice is where relationship bank accounts play their most critical role.
“The idealism of love, is the new realism of business. By building respect and inspiring love, business can move the world.”
~ Kevin Roberts, Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide
Client-Creative Relationships in Progress
Many of us that are in the business of creating a buzz have seen this movie before:
- A bold new vision and mission is euphorically rolled out by the leadership group.
- A general state of expectation is in the air and everyone in the organization is genuinely fired up.
- Not long after the marketing drafts are on the boardroom table, a slipping of the original resolve begins to creep in.
- From this point on, the truest testaments to winning client-creative relationships begins to play out.
Reaching For The Stars Together
The Client-Creative Relationship Conundrum
Creatives are readily inclined to grab hold of visionary pursuit in order to propel new worlds of opportunity forward for their eager and expectant clients. It’s what they do. It’s at the core of why they ultimately exist. At the same time, responsible leadership types typically find themselves grappling with the extended realities of boldly conceived communications plans and often end up drifting further and further away from audacious dreams as real and perceived hurdles begin to mount.
Company decision makers of course really do want and need to move their organizations forward in a dynamically progressive manner, however corporate infrastructure, i.e. people resources and available investment dollars, all too often contribute to an ever so slight cracking of the will. The rubber hits the road. What are genuinely invested creatives to do?
…stay the course. 
A thousand points of light. ~ George Bush Sr.
The Positive Power of a Healthy RBA
On more than a few occasions, timely positioning on the part of our team has boldly championed groundbreaking initiatives that seemed destined for the cutting room floor. It is at these critical and most pivotal moments that clients truly need creatives to be at their courageous best. Speak boldly and confidently with a resonant measure of experience and expertise. Ensure original dreams and dynamic innovations receive their full and due representation.
It would be easier of course to simply bow out and shy away from these theatre type moments. But we understand that winning long-term partner relationships are formed through strategic commitments and creative influences.
RBA Rite of Passage
So how do we earn the right to unflinchingly advance these causes when the mood in the room can at times be unsettled? This is where the full import of genuinely healthy and functioning client-creative relationships truly play out. Just like everyday private and personal bank accounts, one can either invest regularly through positive transactional deposits along the way, or make random careless withdraws depending on the mood of the day. The problem with the latter is, in order to genuinely earn the right to speak one’s mind at the moment of truth; it pays to have your client’s relationship trust account completely topped off for full and positive influence and effect.
Striking a Chord With Decision Makers
In the collaborative world of clients and creatives, it is beyond important to have secured the confidence (through positive RBA deposits) of the leadership groups being served. Client confidence can be bolstered by demonstrating a well-studied and businesslike sensitivity throughout the innovation process.
Take a peek at a few examples of winning relationship bank account deposits below:
Be Prepared.
As in all great paradigm-breaking ventures, the devil is in the details when it comes to performance. The world of advertising and marketing communications is no different. If you hope to win the hearts and minds of the critical decision makers you serve, you must be prepared at all times to invest that something extra. Just like “practice, practice, practice” has served as the motto for youngsters looking to learn exciting new things, “preparation, preparation, preparation” could be seen as the motto to serve notice to decision-making executives that creatives truly believe in what they are pitching and representing. If you hope to endear yourself to decision making executives, it’s a good idea to be preparation proactive when it comes to exploration, strategic discussion and even general meetings. If innovative considerations are supported with well-documented research, corroborative findings and winning case study references, you will most likely find yourself with the leverage to speak boldly when those eventual moments of truth arise.
Be Real.
Cite and share especially what you have learned and gleaned from real life, firsthand experiences. This infuses particular confidence into the decision-making equation and adds to the personal credibility of creatives, resulting in emboldened stakeholder belief and conviction.
Be Malleable.
Understand that client owners and principal decision makers have organizational issues and factors to consider beyond what may be transparent when paradigm-breaking decisions are meted out. At times it pays to save some much-needed energy for another day. Representative decision maker empathy will go a long way with stakeholder groups, however at the same time should never ideally result in unduly acquiescing. It does however allow for respectfully tempered positioning at times when robust and strategic interplay between clients and creatives manifests itself.
Be Human.
As in all interpersonal relationships, a genuine dose of humility and sensitivity will go a long way to ensuring well-placed leverage at times when needed most. If you wish to champion big ideas and groundbreaking initiatives, you will need to ensure critical decision makers and stakeholders embrace the ideation process with an open and supportive mindset. Eliminate whenever and wherever possible any opportunity for spontaneous boardroom theatrics, including personality clashes and general bouts of untimely innuendo. Be calm and patient, yet candidly deliberate. In order for the best ideas to rise to the top in a collaborative partnership, an environment of genuine love and mutual respect must always be prevalent.
Be Strong.
You’ve earned it. If you’ve been generous to a fault with respect to the relationship considerations above, there will no doubt come a time when you will need to be equally strong and courageous in the heat of battle. There’s actually good reason for this. You see, the Chinese, over millennia, have figured out something very unique and special as it relates to the magical ingredients of a happy, fulfilled and contented life. That is this little concept of Yin & Yang. Yin Yang refers to contrast in a sense, and the idea that all things are best served when balanced off magically one against the other.
Consider these legendary and culturally relevant partnership (relationship) duos for example:
Hawkeye Pierce & B.J. Hunnicutt (Brilliant M.A.S.H. Comedic Partners)
Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson (Fabled Private Investigator Team)
Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak (Apple Computers Technology Pioneers)
Fred Flintstone & Barney Rubble (Cartoon Character Buddies)
Jerry Seinfeld & George Costanza (Famous TV Sitcom Duo)
Mick Jagger & Keith Richards (Legendary Rolling Stones Song Writers)
Felix Unger & Oscar Madison (TV’s Gregarious Odd Couple)
Penn & Teller (American Illusionists & Entertainers)
Beauty and the Beast (Timeless Disney Fairy Tale)
What do these memorable twosomes all have in common? They’re all… well, weird. Guess what? Opposites do attract.
None of these relationships and/or partnerships is very conventional to say the least, however each one was and is magical in their own right and has contributed significantly to the wonderful fabric that is our modern culture. You see, it really does take two to tango as the saying goes. And not necessarily two that are singing off the same song sheet either.
There is a lovely and complimentary symmetry to having a yin to your yang, and in the world of advertising and marketing; that yang happens to be the communication creatives who more frequently than not push the boundaries of safe and predictable to the edges of difference making and distinct.
But to earn the right to voice that inner yang, even when your yin partners are a little more on the apprehensive and judicious side, now that takes a relationship bank account that is to say the least, more than a trifle topped off. Be sure to make a deposit (or twenty!) in your relationship bank accounts today.
For an overview of outside the box campaigns that worked, call us today at 1-204-235-1284.