Understanding the Client Mindset

It was the final day of the seminar, and it had been a pretty exhaustive experience so far. With all the discussions, workshops, and presentations we'd absorbed, some of us were beginning to feel a bit drained. But then there was Don Just's workshop on understanding the client mindset.

We had all been given a team assignment earlier in the week to work on and devise a solution. The first portion of Don's workshop was the group presentations of that assignment. It proved to be one of the most challenging presentations to give and some of the most entertaining presentations to watch all week.

Now, I don't want to give away what the assignment was nor do I want to disclose what were presented as solutions to the challenge. This particular assignment is used with the students as well (God forbid some VCU students google the project for class next year and find me giving away vital information). But let's just say Don Just played tough.

First, let me say a little bit about Don. Don Just is a former bank president turned CEO of the Martin Agency. He took the Martin Agency in 1982 from a small ad shop to one of the most recognized and successful agencies around in about 10 years. Since then he has gone on to pursue a variety of consulting opportunities. He is a business man who seems to get the ad industry, but he gets it in a way that is unique to creatives. He sees it from the "effectiveness" side.

In the workshop, Don simulated the realities of client presentations, and drove home some of the key points we all need to keep in mind with respect to how we work with our clients:

Clients are looking for solutions. Clients tend to think in terms of finding business solutions to their problems. Agencies have a tendency to think in terms of marketing executions. That is a conflict.

The agency must be prepared to respond to any and all objections from the client. It's pompous and foolish to think they're going to be enamored with our work and ideas. We have to earn that scenario by answering all of their concerns.

The agency must be a strategic partner, not an executional partner. If the relationship is the latter, the relationship has gone bad and must be re-established or terminated.

Clients are about mitigating risk. Agencies are about taking risks without rationale. Agencies need to rationalize what they're proposing. That way it looks a lot less like a risk, and a lot more like a good idea.

Don shared many, many valuable insights (too many to list here), but what he provided most importantly were some eye opening examples of what agencies fail to realize when dealing with their clients. Seemingly simple observations centered around really understanding the clients business and how that goes so far in creating not only a successful relationship, but successful business solutions.