20 questions to ask about reinventing your business model

May 14, 2010 | Author: Tim Williams

Remember, the answers you get are always a result of the questions you ask.

Marketing communications firms are scrambling to reorganize and restructure to meet the needs of a marketplace that's changing at warp speed. Agencies need to meet this disruptive change in the market with disruptive change within their organizations. But to get the right answers you have to start with the right questions. Here are Ignition's top 20:

1. Beyond advertising, have we defined what business we're really in?

2. Can we articulate the ultimate value we bring to client relationships?

3. How can we focus on being best in class instead of trying to be best in everything?

4. What do we need to do to extend idea generation beyond the creative department?

5. What additional skills or capabilities do we need to make the transition from mass marketing to one-to-one marketing?

6. How can we create more value for our clients in the area of brand experience, not just brand perception?

7. How do we effectively deal with the increasingly blurred lines between advertising and PR (paid and non-paid)?

8. In today's world of multichannel communication, who is the gatekeeper of ideas?

9. How can we devote just as much creativity to message placement as we do message creation?

10. What else do we need to do to make digital a competency instead of a department?

11. How can we retool the production function to be more versatile and creative – production in the Hollywood sense?

12. How can we change our process to from linear to organic to better reflect the ongoing nature of digital assignments, including real-time analytics and optimization?

13. How can we demonstrate more accountability in our client relationships?

14. How can we further flatten our organization to provide better client access to our best people?

15. How can we remove any of the disincentives – real or perceived – for working collaboratively?

16. How can we redesign our jobs and role descriptions to better reflect what we really do (not what we used to do)?

17. What unconventional ways can we use to market our own brand?

18. What do we need to do to make pricing (not estimating) a core competence of our firm?

19. What's holding us back from experimenting with new forms of compensation that are not based on the misaligned "billable hour" system?

20. How could we develop, own, and profit from more of our own intellectual property?

Devote the rest of this year to answering these questions and you'll be well on your way to reinventing your business model to be more relevant and valuable to your clients.