Miriam HaraWe’ve all heard it before: The sign of a good manager is someone who surrounds themselves with stronger people. This business strategy can be employed in all aspects of business. Ultimately, by hiring people that are stronger, it implies that the manager understands what they don’t know. In other words, they know what they’re not good at and hire people to fit the missing requirements. It seems simple, even logical and it has proven to be effective in many managers’ careers. So why don’t more businesses employ this same business strategy for marketing their business and brands?
Consider this, with the business world rapidly evolving and with the introduction of new channels in marketing, how ‘on top’ of all the new technologies can an internal marketing department be? After all, it still has the business of brand to be responsible for. The brand strategy, the brand plan, the brand market share: All of this is the marketing team’s responsibility – and rightly so.
Too often in business, corporate marketing departments put their internal design and creative team at the helm of packaging design. Sometimes they are even sanctioned to develop their own ‘branding’ ads and even book their own media. Many think of design and media as an extension of marketing, and it is. What it shouldn’t be though, is part of the internal marketing department. If a successful business strategy is to populate the team with stronger talent, shouldn’t that same model apply when developing and working on brand initiatives?
Outsourcing is a solid business strategy. Here’s why:
An internal creative team is limited to what they can work on. They are limited to the company that employs them. Some of them have little exposure to other creative talents and rely on themselves for inspiration. Regardless of this fact, it’s true that creative departments in agencies have taken a huge hit from the expanded roles of in-house creative departments in corporations. For the most part, in-house creative staff are not skilled to be specialists like those from an agency – through no fault of their own.
An agency’s business is creative. It’s not a vertical offshoot or an ‘additional’ support service to the core marketing team. When you consider that an outside agency works on many different businesses in many different industries, they inevitably foster a creative environment for their creative department to learn and grown in a way that in-house creative departments can’t.
With so many lines being blurred, many media representatives will go directly to the client who is advertising – selling marketing brand managers on their specific type of media. Of course they will, however they’re selling only one media property. There’s nothing objective about that. An agency’s business revolves around the media and its applications. It is the agency’s responsibility to stay on top of the latest trends and to objectively assess how those trends can be integrated with brand strategies. Let a seasoned media strategist do the work. It’s their job is to know what’s out there, what’s new and how to properly assess the media and develop a plan that garners results.
An effective business strategy is one that delivers not only on projects but on results. Outsourcing brand initiatives to develop stronger strategies in innovative ways makes all the sense in the business world. Don’t you agree?
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