Take as look at the sign in the picture. Pizza Orgasmica. OK, seems pretty clear. And Brewing Company…well, OK. And Brazilian food. What the hell?

There was a time when any good brand strategist would have probably fainted at the sight of this, not in anticipation of a Brazilian food-and-brew-gasm, but because 1. it makes no sense and 2. it is too diffuse, with three messages. “Pick one,” we’d insist. “Pick that one thing that will be remembered through all the messaging clutter!”  Indeed, having to say this was probably the easiest way to identify an amateur client in need of a lot of expensive handholding and remedial education.

But today, not so much. So when I saw this last week I sort of wanted to go into the place, ask for the manager, and tip my hat. Why? What’s changed? Well, everything has changed. The networked social-media driven revolution saw to that. But what matters here is this: this little establishment – oops, I mean growing chain –  is telling a unique story, building a narrative, and inviting people into it literally and figuratively. It’s unique, it’s memorable, it’s extendable (add Asian fusion and I’d buy it, why not?). It’s got a space and owns it. It has a unique set of pillars and a unique relationship with a cross-section of diverse people that make up its brand community. Heck, I’m a pro, I live 3000 miles away, had no time to go in, never tasted it, and I’m here blogging about it. When was the last time I gave a hoot about a “leading brand” like Dove, Dial, Sanka, etc? A long time. Why? Because their stories have grown one dimensional, stale, and feel inauthentic, mere abstractions or “positionings”.  But a Dynamic Brand lives and feels real, warts and all. And people like it. I’ll take my pizza-gasm on a plate thanks!

Lesson: In the networked world of Dynamic Brands, the best thing you can do is own an authentic story and invite others to help write it. Throw out the rules, that’s the only thing that matters. So be sure that all insights, ideas, interation and alignment serves this one end. The rest is detail.

In the last year, we have had the pleasure of speaking with a fair number of marketing executives, each of whom was trying to decide if they should fire their advertising agency.  Most had been with their current agency for a couple of years and were starting to feel uneasy about the relationship.  And while they had often failed to put anything concrete on paper as to why they might want to terminate the relationship, a few thoughts seemed to bubble to the surface consistently.

So, for all of you Marketing Directors, CMO’s and VP’s of Marketing, we have aggregated your various thoughts to give you 5 Reasons You Need to Fire Your Advertising Agency.  Happy hunting.

1) “My agency doesn’t get digital.” As far as we are concerned, the digital horse has left the barn.  Even if you are small company working with a small agency, you should be talking about your digital strategy.  If your advertising agency has not provided you with digital thinking as part of the communications plan, then fire them today.  Better yet, fire them over their non-existent Facebook page. Given the fact that my wife’s 92 year-old great-grandmother uses Facebook to stay on top of what my 6 year-old daughter is doing, you should expect that all products or services,regardless of the type of customer, need to have a plan for how they are engaging customers using digital media.

2) “My agency doesn’t play well with others.” Advertising agencies have spent a long time at the top of the communications agency pile.  And even though some of the luster has worn off of them lately, they still control huge budgets, lots of eyeballs, and much of the attention of marketing clients.  Given that,if your advertising agency is constantly at odds with your PR firm, brand strategy firm, digital firm, design firm or even your management consultants, then it is time to fire them today.  The name of the game for busy marketing professional is integration and alignment. Your company should be operating from a central brand and corporate strategy.  Often times, the advertising agency may not like that strategy and will push back for something “better”.  That is to be expected. But at some point, you, as the client need to determine who is driving the strategy ship. If you decide it is someone other than the advertising agency,then your agency needs to fall in line. Who needs to spend valuable time trying to mash together incoherent strategies from 5 different firms?  Trust us, there are thousands of agencies out there who would be willing and able to give you great work under any well developed strategy.

3) “My agency doesn’t push me.” This might seem strange, particularly following the previous discussion in item 2, but your advertising agency needs to push you to be creative and innovative about your brand.  One of the primary skill sets your agency brings to bear is creativity. If they can’t find a way to use that creativity to push you beyond where you are currently thinking about your products, your services and your brand, then they aren’t as persuasive or creative as they should be. And given that creativity and persuasion are precisely what agencies are supposed to do well, be concerned. While it is important for the agency to be able to listen and follow orders when a final decision is made, the process of getting to brand and communication decisions should be creative and innovate, at least from the agency side.  If not, let them go.

4) “My agency delivers mediocre creative.” Certain things should be unacceptable.  5 star restaurants should never serve bad food, $500 smartphones should never make it more difficult to place a phone call, and advertising agencies should not deliver bad creative.  There are a couple of caveats.  First, fight with the agency over the development of the creative brief, not the creative.  Make sure to put them in a very tight and well defined strategic box, with clear objectives, and then get out of their way.  If you find yourself spending more time picking over the fonts they use, or the logo size than you do the development and execution against the creative strategy, you are either already getting bad creative, or you are causing your agency to deliver bad creative.  Second, understand that great creative may not go viral.  That takes luck, and you shouldn’t fire an agency for not creating the next Subservient Chicken.  But, if the work doesn’t speak to your consumers (that was in the creative brief), it is boring to you and the target, is not clever, smart, funny, engaging, emotional, or clear, and that is happening on a regular basis, then it is time to fire the agency.  They clearly don’t care to give you good work, or they have gotten bored with you and your category. Say, “Sayonara.”

5) You don’t need an agency. There are some products and services that don’t need an advertising agency, no matter how hard the agency may want to be needed.  I had a telecommunications client that made a specialized laser. It was so specialized that only 10 firms in the world were in the market to purchase it.  I am not saying that this client didn’t need to market themselves.  But, after developing a really sound brand and architecture strategy, they did not need to spend money on an advertising agency.  They needed great brochures and brochureware. Today I would recommend some sort of app that emulates the product.  I would make sure that they had a good digital presence with technical content from their key scientists.  But I would not tell them to hire an advertising agency.  Advertising agencies are great at communicating the virtues of brands and products to large numbers of potential customers.  If you don’t have large numbers of potential customers, then you likely don’t need an agency.

So there you have it.  Five reasons you need to fire your agency today.  Notice that we did not mention flagging sales, or loss of market share.  While there have been some colossal mistakes made by advertising agencies, in most cases, loss of share, margins, or revenue fall more squarely on the shoulders of clients than they do agencies.  That is a topic for another time.  But, if your agency relationship looks like what we have described above, put on your Donald Trump mask.  You have work to do.

In the never ending battle to determine the value of social media in building your brand, let us add another smoking log to the conflagration.  According to this lovely infographic from Digital Surgeons, 40% of facebook users follow a brand on facebook, verses 25% on twitter.  Of those brand followers however, a higher percentage of twitter users are likely to purchase the brand they are following than the facebook users. (67% to 51% respectively.)

What does this all mean?  Tough to say, but I will suggest a couple of ideas.  First, the twitter format is less conducive to idle following than Facebook, (stream vs a combination of stream and digital destination).  As a result, you see fewer, but more committed brand followers on twitter.   Second, the slightly younger facebook audience might be more willing to shop various brands without having intention or ability to purchase them.

Of course there are likely to be those who go the purely causal route and suggest that twitter conversations drive brand preference more so than facebook conversations.  That may be the case, but I would need to see more evidence.

In any event, I think it would interesting to understand how the Archos 6 Brand Desires are satisfied differently by twitter and facebook.  That would be most enlightening, don’t you think?

Hearing or experiencing a “So What?!?” response means that you have failed to create an “a-ha!” moment and that critical momentum has been lost.  We have all been in the presence of teams or organizations that routinely seem to seize seemingly simple and obvious “ah-ha!” moments, while others are left to ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?”.  Insight driven organizations may not always make the perfect business decisions, but their execution is never far off, and even their occasional mistakes seem to connect with their customers’ core desires.  In a world where data and information are available to everyone, insight, or the ability to discern and derive new connections and meaning from commonly available data, is one of the four keys to building a Dynamic Brand (the other three being Ideas, Alignment and Integration).

Unfortunately, few companies understand the nature of insight,let along the idea that they can organize their entire company to be insight driven. A few years back, I was asked by a client to help make sense of their new consumer research program.  On the verge of becoming the industry leading manufacturer of power tools, they had decided to spend more than a million dollars, over 12 months, on research of all types to understand their market.   Man-on-the-street interviews, ethnographic studies, attitude and brand studies, conjoint analysis of product attributes and customer segmentation were all part of the program.  Unfortunately, having completed this work they still felt as if critical questions around consumer lifestyle, preferences and desires remained unanswered.  My team was hired to look at their research results to see if we could come up with any answers.

After a couple of weeks of sifting through their data, we developed a simple solution. We created a poster-sized graphic of the customer life-cycle for their most popular product.  We then proceeded to place the key findings their research on the life-cycle chart, taking care to precisely place each finding on the corresponding moment in the relationship between the customer and the power tool. The result was instantaneous. By framing their data in a novel way, their research was suddenly providing insight into product development, advertising and media, distribution, and even employee training. Our simple “insight chart” remains on the walls of decision makers throughout their organization, driving decisions that have allowed them to become the category leader.

Insight is not information, even though information is involved. Insight is not research, even though research is involved. Insight is the practice or result of drawing new connections between things that are currently known, to find new, helpful conclusions that solve problems and move business forward.  It is about discernment and discrimination.  Insight driven businesses follow no strict set of guidelines for structure or process, but they do have certain things in common.

-  Insight  driven organizations appreciate fresh eyes.  Often it takes someone with a new and different perspective to look at what you know and draw new and useful conclusions.

-  Insight driven organizations learn how to prioritize information.  In an era where technology has made the availability of information a burden, insight driven organizations learn through practice how to organize and use information to develop new truths and insight into their world, while successfully culling the noise in the system.

- Insight  driven organizations believe in the “a-ha!”.  Perhaps most important in the success of any venture or activity is the belief that it can actually be. Organizations that consistently mine insight believe that there are answers and truths to be discovered.  Think of agents Mulder and Scully from the X-files.  “The Truth is out There” would be a perfect motto for the insight driven organization.

If you want to lead an organization that is constantly keyed into what is going on with your customers in ways that generate new thinking and endless “a-ha!” moments, be insight driven.

It’s time to let loyalty go.

Too often loyalty simply means repeat purchase, and this is often confused with an alleged emotional commitment that will sustain through challenges. And while repeat purchase is a good thing, and behavior matters in the end, in an age of nearly infinite choice, downward price pressure, unsustainable differentiation, raising expectations, frequent promotions, increasing consumer expectations, and the influence of social media, loyalty is the wrong idea, even a pipe dream.

Instead, invest in relation and resilience. In a digital and social networked world, relation replaces loyalty, and it drives not merely repeat, but also resilience, allowing the relationship to survive challenges. When consumers are easily distracted and disappointed, the best way to ensure their long term engagement with the brand, through thick and thin, is to deliver the kind of relationship that abides. Old school, one-way, one dimensional messaging, promotional tactics, and even user satisfaction won’t suffice; they are outdated and focused on “loyalty.”

Instead, engage users in a story, a story that the brand and the user make together. We do this by focusing on the points of overlap and possibility between consumers’ Desire and brands’ Dynamic Essence.

The entire game has changed. Dynamic Branding helps the new world make sense.

We’re brand strategists and consultant CBO’s, reinventing brand strategy for the digital age by making the Dynamic Brand™. We create overdue breakthrough solutions to age old brand and business problems. We place these solutions directly in the hands of clients, ensuring that the best brand insights and ideas will be discovered and developed in every initiative and at every touch point. We’re brand-centric thought leaders, creating new paths to business success for clients who don’t trust the status quo to deliver the results they demand. We discover and make stories for brands, and inspire employees, markets, and users to join us.