Advertising agencies should concentrate on selling their clients’ product first; having beautiful creative is a secondary issue.
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Entrepreneur: Jeremy Hope, Managing Director
Company: Hope AD
Business type: Advertising, marketing, design and production services
Founded: 1990
Turnover: $2M - $10M
Head office: Windsor, Victoria
Contact details: +61 3 9529 7799
The Hope AD Story
Most advertising agencies think about creative ideas before they consider the underlying business reasons for a campaign, according to the managing director of Hope Advertising and Design (Hope AD), Jeremy Hope. He must be on to something: Hope AD won two high commendations at the tenth Australian Catalogue Awards for excellence in catalogue design, production and effectiveness in June 2001.
Jeremy Hope began his career as a graphic designer in 1979 but went back to study marketing at RMIT in 1995. He wanted to understand his clients’ businesses from their perspective. “We call ourselves an advertising agency but we help our clients sell their products and services. The Catalogue Award was for producing a catalogue that had the desired result - it sold product.
“Fundamentally, no matter what business you are in, you’ve got to sell something. Secondly, you need a written plan. Ninety per cent of the people I talk to don’t have one. And you know the old saying: ‘Fail to plan and you are planning to fail’. Everyone knows their business but they haven’t quite documented it. They’ve got a vision - trying to get it out of the managing director’s head is my job.”
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Key learning points:
- Business segmentation - There are usually two sides to the client base of any business: business-to-business and business-to-consumer. You need different strategies for each.
- Customer cycle - Understand the phases of the business-to-business customer cycle. You should send a consistent message, and use performance indicators that can be monitored and evaluated.
- Classifying customers - On the business-to-consumer side, use simple market segmentation: Who is most likely to buy? Where can you find them? How do you talk to them? What are your key messages and how frequently must they be sent?
- Unique selling points - You must tell consumers one or two unique features about your product or service that differentiate it from that of the competition.
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Hope first encourages his clients to segment their business. “Usually, you find there is the business-to-business side and then the business-to-consumer side. In the business-to-business side, make sure you have a good sales program in place to target hot prospects - and know the phases, then monitor and evaluate.”
By ‘know the phases’ Hope means understand the customer cycle. He explains: “First of all there are hot prospects, and you go through this presentation period, then they start putting some business your way so they become new business customers. You have then got to move them to loyal customers. You have got to give them what they want, give them the results, give them the loving, and then get them to a point where they say: ‘We are happy with these guys’ - because they have probably got two (suppliers) going.”
Businesses need to send a consistent advertising message to customers. They also need performance indicators - numbers of hot prospects, calls per week, converts to new or loyal customers - with which they can monitor and evaluate the performance of their salespeople.
Hope says: “The business-to-consumer side is different because that is all about brand preference, brand attitude and brand awareness. It actually isn’t that complicated, but you are talking about going to the masses as against a one-on-one relationship.”
Hope shows his clients how to segment the mass market. “I need to know who is most likely to buy this product or service, based on past sales. I need to find out where they are - their demographics, how they talk, what they like and dislike - their psychographics. Then it’s a matter of telling them one or two key messages about the uniqueness of your product and then the frequency of that message.”
Hope constantly tries to get his clients to think clearly about what is unique about their product or service and why people should prefer it to competitors’ products.