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Aprais Client-agency Relationships Agency Business

How client-agency relationships are affected by business category

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July 27, 2021 | 3 min read

There are many influences governing the way marketers and agencies evaluate each other’s performance, but our new report series highlights the effect that brand categories have on the way they score each other

When we compare the average scores given by clients of their agencies and agencies of clients, clear differences between categories are evident as illustrated in the chart below.

Click here to download our free category reports.

When marketers and agencies in a particular sector score each other lower than those working in other sectors it could mean that both clients and agencies alike are harder to please, or that the category itself is simply a more demanding category.

Take the ‘Beauty & personal care’ category for example. This seems to fall into the area of a more considered purchase, where the nature of the product or the absolute cost, seem to put more pressure on teams. Lighter purchase decisions such as drinks and confectionery seem to enjoy more generous scores.

Specific challenges exist in each sector that don’t affect others. We also know that across all sectors, clients tend to score their agencies less favourably than agencies score their clients. There are many reasons for this, and the most obvious is that agencies are unwilling to be too critical of their paying clients.

Differences also exist by region. For example, relationships generally score higher in North America than in other regions of the world.

There are, however, clear opportunities for both agencies and clients to improve their performances, through behavioural change. These opportunities are richer and more complex than just functional attributes – ‘doing the job’.

The seven behaviours we identified as most important to client-agency teams are: Challenge; Accountability; Communication; Goals; Functional; Trust; and Resilience.

One way we find useful to determine the opportunities for teams to improve, is to compare the behaviours of top and bottom performers.

As an example, let’s look at one of the ‘tough’ categories mentioned above, Beauty & personal care. The graphs below compare our seven behavioural traits of the top (10%) performing client and agency teams with the bottom 10%. This reveals the potential for improvement for each. The larger the gap, the greater the opportunity for each to contribute toward a better relationship.

What our data indicates is that in the Beauty & personal care category, there is an opportunity for marketers (37) and their agencies (60) to improve their resilience. These are comparatively large numbers and suggest a major opportunity for poor performers to narrow the gap with the best. The data also tells us that agencies appear to want more trust (35) from their clients and clients would like to see more challenging (52) behaviour from their agencies.

The power of data like this is it demonstrates unequivocally that team performances can be improved through functional and behavioural change.

In fact, our data also shows that clients and agencies that undergo regular evaluations consistently score one another higher over time, demonstrating that paying attention to the relationship itself, as well as the work produced and other functional measurements, will lead to improvements and increased satisfaction for both parties.

Click here to download our free category reports.

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