Expertise Required: Choosing An Agency

What do you consider to be the most important factor in selecting an agency to help you build your brand? Reputation? Cost? Size? Year Established? These are certainly considerations, but when budgets are tight and costly mistakes not an option, your primary consideration should be expertise. You’re hiring an outside agency because you need to partner with a team that knows more than you, right? They should be able to support your efforts and come up with ideas you might not have thought of, precisely because they are experts.

For example, if you are launching a new boutique hotel in Miami, you might be tempted to work with a big branding firm that has launched lots of household names. But if they specialize in CPG, will they really do your brand justice? You should be working with someone that knows how to build a brand from scratch, but that also understands the competitive landscape and how to speak to the target audience. Partnering with a firm with the right expertise will lead to the best possible strategy and design for your brand. Let’s break down the three main components of branding expertise:

• The Right Fit
• The Right Knowledge Base
• The Right Solution

The Right Fit

How do you define the Right Fit? It might seem like a superfluous, touchy-feely idea, but it’s crucial to the success of your collaboration. Too many times, companies go with an agency that looks great on paper, ignoring the lack of chemistry. This can lead to miscommunication, mistrust, and ultimately, a lack of vision and efficacy. You should be considering personality, working style, and structure. Is it required for your brand’s reputation and scope of work that you partner with one monolith agency with different divisions to address your various branding, marketing, advertising, media buying and interactive needs? Or would you be better served to select different firms with specific expertise, guided by a Lead Agency?

The Right Knowledge Base

The Right Knowledge Base is more than just experience with similar brands or industries. Understanding the competitive landscape is important, but can be accomplished through research. What really makes the difference is when an agency understands how to speak to your target audience. If the target audience is not approached properly, you will lose them to the marketer, brand, or product that does.

The Right Solution

With the right fit and the right knowledge base in place, you can focus on your agency’s ability to come up with the Right Solution.  Although it’s helpful to see what they may have done for other brands, what’s important is that they come up with solutions customized to your brand’s particular goals. Ideally, they will take your assignment and come back to you with the creative that you’ve requested as well as an iteration that meets the goals and takes it a step further. The ability to do this comes from an expert understanding of what your brand does, what competitive brands are doing, and what no one else has done.

Choosing an agency can be stressful; you have a lot riding on their ability to execute. But if you partner with an agency that is the right fit, has the right knowledge base, and has a proven track record of coming up with the right solutions, you have removed the majority of obstacles to success. Expertise is not a panacea, but it is a good investment. When you choose experts and trust their strategic insights and recommendations, you are more likely to get the campaign right the first time and less likely to waste time and resources struggling with a learning curve. Beware of generalists: knowing a little bit about everything can be attractive but dangerous. Knowing a lot about exactly what you need, is well, expertise defined.