Your Offerings Aren’t as Unique as You Think They Are

By Tim Williams

The great irony of our business continues to be the absolute inability of agencies to do for themselves what they do for their clients.

For brand marketers, agencies help segment their audiences, identify key customer benefits, and craft differentiating positioning strategies. But for their own brand, agencies serve up a soup of undifferentiated claims and platitudes that promise everything to everybody.

Despite offering the exact same list of competencies and capabilities as most other firms, agencies want their clients to believe their service offerings are unmatched and unrivaled.

Reframing around problems and solutions

A surprising number of agency professionals defend their unimaginative list of service offerings based on the belief that “while other agencies may say, they’re creative, we really are creative.” Or “While other agencies may claim to be strategic, we offer true strategic thinking.” In other words, we do the same thing as everyone else, only better. Not a very convincing marketing platform for companies that are in the business of marketing.

The bullet-point list of capabilities featured on most agency websites represents the bare minimum of what clients need and expect from their agency partners It goes without saying that your firm offers “campaign development.” This would be the equivalent of a car repair service saying they know how to fasten bolts.

More to the point, this is not what clients actually buy from marketing service providers. They don’t buy services, but rather solutions to business problems. As cosmetics magnate Charles Revson observed, “In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the stores, we sell hope.”

Curating your unique list of client business problems

Visit the website of agencies who understand this and you’ll see that what they feature isn’t a predictable list of competencies, but rather a carefully curated set of client problems they are well-suited suited to solve. They go on to showcase the programs they have developed to address these problems.

This is what is being referred to as the “productization” of professional services. These firms offer products, programs and platforms that are in effect “solution sets” comprised of various agency capabilities put together in way that is hard to copy.

This enables them to showcase offerings that are substantially different from other firms. We. Communications, longtime business partner to high-profile technology brands like Microsoft, reframed their offerings away from such things as product publicity, media relations, and social media campaigns to a coalition of solutions sets that include:

Company Transformation

Launch Pad

C-Suite Surround

Reputation Resilience

Brand Resonance

AI Accelerator

Each of these six programs is supported by a series of products. For example, the “Reputation Resilience” program toolkit includes:

-      Threat and Issues Assessment

-      Crisis Response Simulations and Playbooks

-      Reputation Intelligence

After thoroughly assessing the core problems their clients are dealing with, We. Communications assembles a set of programs that will effectively meet the challenge. Clients of this firm no longer buy individual agency services, or worse — “buckets of hours” — but rather pre-priced, custom-configured programs and products that are proven to solve the pressing issues they’re dealing with.

Capturing premium value through premium offerings

No other firm in their space can easily replicate what We. does, because the agency has taken the time to reframe their abilities in a distinctive, solution-oriented, client-centric way that delivers premium value.

We. Communications is an example of an established firm that transformed its business model — a stellar archetype of an agency that took legacy competencies, added new lead-edge capabilities and bundled them together into high-value programs designed for today’s digital-first, AI-powered businesses.

A stand-out example at the extreme end of AI-optimized business models is the new firm 10,000 Robots, an organization “where humans and machines work together to create intelligent digital experiences.”

10,000 Robots (or 10KR) avoids the knee-jerk approach of listing its services and instead showcases the problems it solves for its clients, organized into three categories:

Brand Problems

“We want to create a new category and position ourselves as its leader.”

“We have a great product but we need a compelling brand story.”

Etc.

Product Problems

“We need to improve conversion and increase signups.”

“We need to improve our customers’ self-service options.”

Etc.

Content Problems

“We’ve been recycling the same assets for too long.”

“We need a content system that scales across platforms.”

Etc.

The firm then offers up a set of hybrid human-powered and AI-powered solutions that will do the job — a far cry from “Here’s a list of all the stuff we do; just pick what you think you need.”

Approaching client relationships from the top down

Perhaps the most important point is that a program/product offering approaches client relationships from the top-down instead of bottom-up. This methodology starts at the top by asking “What is the problem?” rather than the bottom-up approach of asking “What do you want?”

It’s a proactive approach that frames the agency as a valued growth driver instead of a reactive service provider. That’s a critically important distinction in an era where clients increasingly view agencies as passive order-fillers.

Why aren’t all agencies moving in the direction of productization? For the same predictable reasons most companies aren’t optimizing for the future: habit, momentum and internal thinking. But in professional services, there’s another important source of resistance: the belief that everything they do is custom, unique, one-of-a-kind. This simply isn’t true.

Avoiding the Uniqueness Trap

Psychologists call this “The Uniqueness Trap” — the tendency for individuals and companies to think they’re more unusual than they actually are. In professional services, this manifests as the belief that most projects are one of a kind.

An extensive study by Tufts University shows that while managers are highly prone to believe that their projects are inimitable, few, if any, actually are. In fact, in a study of more than 1,300 projects in 34 companies, the researchers reported that whenever they came across a project they thought might be unique, it turned out not to be. Someone, somewhere, had solved a similar problem in a similar way.

Specifically in the agency industry, here’s our firm’s view of the uniqueness of projects:

Keep in mind that while we’re trying to standardize the process for getting to a solution, we’re not attempting to standardize the solution itself. Quite the opposite. Having effective roadmaps and frameworks for problem solving means our teams will actually have more time to devote to the actual substance of the solution.

Especially as the impact of AI continues to upend the agency business, the industry is now facing an inevitable fork in the road. The direction taken by most firms is to attempt to outwork and outshout competitors — a tough slog. The other direction is to reframe what you do in a more valuable, differentiated way.

The future of the agency business is solution-based productization augmented by the power of artificial intelligence. And the time to start is yesterday.