The Marmite Measure: Choosing the right agency
The marmite measure: Choosing the right agency
How do you know which marketing agency is right for your company? Here at Pixel8 we’ve come up with the marmite measure, a criteria of sorts to help you choose the right agency to fulfil your objectives.
As soon as you hear the word marmite, you instantly know whether it’s for you or not and the same should be of agencies. Agencies can’t serve everyone, even if they don’t know it themselves. If you had a choice of five agencies, you should be able to know which four can’t push your buttons.
The biggest thing to look for when selecting an agency is fit. You are effectively buying a team, a blend of skills and people that can amplify your marketing efforts. You have to decide, if budget was no issue, whether you would employ this team to represent your business internally.
If it’s a no, then get them off the pot and find an agency that you would quite happily hire as your internal marketing team. We aim to be hated by most, we make it clear why we are a bad fit for most and loved by few. The clients that we do work with appreciate our blend of efforts and our individual team members. Just like we need to quickly remove employees that aren’t aligned with our culture or way of working, we need to quickly move on from clients who are the same.
When I look back over the last 15 years and think which clients we’ve added the most value for, it’s where the fit was the best. That mutual respect and willingness to add value, learn and act as if we were part of their business. Services and creds are important but unless it’s a team effort between us and our clients it’s difficult to make it work. The type of agency client relationship that we strive for is not one built on projects being thrown back and forth over the fence. Some agencies are well suited for it, but that’s just not us.
Do you want an agency to buy into your vision and provide solutions to move the dial or do you want to give the agency very specific projects.
The marmite measure:
- Would I employ the heads of specialisms to work for me in house?
- Would I go for a coffee with the team?
- Can I see myself working with this agency and happily communicate with them daily, weekly or monthly?
- Can I see their culture, does it align with my company?
When you get it right, it’s right for a long time. We’ve had relationships that have lasted well over a decade and all because of this formula. MCRactive, who first came to us in 2009 have trusted us with our working smarter process to provide them with the perfect design and marketing solution, delivering considerable cost savings, simplified marketing function and dramatically improved ideation, design and brand engagement. You can find out more about the work we’ve done with them by clicking here.
To find out whether we score well on the marmite test – get in touch!
