Marketing Intelligence by Iain Johnston

Most people are familiar with the phrase “cobblers shoes“, actually an abbreviation of “cobblers’ children’s shoes”, the reference supposed to be that the shoes of children of people who make and repair shoes are often pretty shabby.

Similarly from Luke 4,23 “physician heal thyself“, implying some of the most poorly people are doctors themselves, and alleging a degree of hypocrisy in their approach.

Well, it’s a real shame to admit it but marketing agencies can be pretty poor at their own marketing. There, it’s out. In fact, I’ve been looking at agency web sites for a month or two now while Loewy has been refreshing its own. There seems to be plenty of bright/black/flash/beautiful/anything but very little in the way of distinctive branding, and hardly any examples of consistent messaging to support the essence of a brand, whatever it might be.

Ok so the pressure’s on, I can see the headline already: “Marketing Services CEO has the temerity to criticise other agencies’ web sites (the idiot)”. In fact I will resist the temptation to get all defensive or offer the sort of excuses we often have to work around with clients (no budget, can’t get sign off, hamster ate the source code of the previous site, etc.).

The fact is, our old site was poor, and a sad representation of a business for whom 20% of the revenue is digital stuff.

However, it gets worse. If any client had the mish-mash of branding hierarchy that we had until recently, we would have thought “right, here we can REALLY help”. We had the same name for group company as for several operating businesses, a source of real confusion. The shame of it is, it has taken me nine months in my job to fix this.

At least its sorted, for now at least.

Now, on to our creds……..