No More Cobblers Children Stories

One of the things that I have been saying since I started in my job about 10 months ago, is that we (meaning the internal marketing team) need to do the same things for our company that our company does for our clients. And I guess if you say it long enough eventually people start to listen.

What I meant was that when a client engages us (Sapient) to do virtually any of the things we do, one of the first things we would do is some form of research. Research, of course is such a broad term, that can mean anything from competitive reviews, to customer surveys, to one on one interviews and focus groups, among lots of other techniques. This research would then form a platform that the rest of the marketing programs, creative design, and everything else we would do for the client would rest upon.

But when I took a look at what we as an organization had done for ourselves, well, let's just say that the research was lacking. And, frankly, our marketing materials, and especially our Web site showed this. And the redesign of our Web site was a main focus for me. I felt that along with us, none of our competitors had truly done a great job in positioning themselves online. Great job done for clients, but not for ourselves. And I felt there was an opportunity there. I also got so tired of hearing about 'cobblers children' as an excuse for why our site was (let's say) a little lacking. I'd heard that at my previous employer, another large interactive agency (who has since redone their site).

I have literally been working on this project since January, when we did, first, a review and assessment of our competitors (and our own) web sites and positioning. And the results were actually interesting. Based on this competitive review, I then performed a number of internal positioning workshops, in some of our major offices across the world (Miami, Atlanta, London, Boston, San Francisco). We did card sorting exercises, word associations, open-ended discussions of our brand and positioning and those of our competitors. The attendees were from the various disciplines in our organization, technologists, account executives, creatives, business development, information architects.

Talking up the results we had found in these workshops, I still very much felt that there was an opportunity to truly position ourselves in a unique way that would drive home our brand promise. While some of our competitors had unique and interesting sites from a visual design p.o.v., they were all pretty much the same, with pretty much the same 5 tabs: About Us, Our Work, Our Services, News, Contact Us. There was also no true positioning that any of the competitors we looked at had. The way all of us spoke of ourselves was practically the same, almost all using the same words or phrases: innovative, intersection of marketing and technology, art and science, engaging experiences, inventing the future. The list of similar terms and phrases of the way all of the agencies speak of themselves is a long one.

We are all describing ourselves the same way. In fact, once we took the logo and name of the agency off of the descriptions each has on its site, it was virtually impossible for almost anyone we tested to tell them apart and figure out which agency's self-description was which. And these were individuals who have been in the industry for many years and have actually worked for a number of these agencies.

(On a similar note: Sapient actually has 2 sides to the organization, the interactive agency side, and the technology consulting side. We found pretty much the same thing on the technology consulting side, but with a different list of words and phrases).

So, as the next step, we've recently kicked off a full-blown research project to truly do for ourselves the exact same type of project that we would do for a client. I've basically engaged and am working pretty much full time with one of our client research teams to do a much more in-depth branding and positioning research project across the entire organization. We are about half-way through, and have already interviewed a majority of our leadership team, clients, and have on tap to do one-on-one interviews with more clients, and very senior level 'non-clients' (CMOs and CIOs/CTOs of Global 200 organizations) across our geographies. In fact the team and I are leaving on Monday for 10 days in Europe to ensure we are getting a global view across these stakeholders and constituents. We are also doing a full-blown, more in-depth competitive assessment across all of our business lines.

We are then going to be gathering the top branding experts from across the organization for a workshop to take the results from this research and come up with a competitive positioning that truly represents our organization.

Oh, and the research will also inform our new Web site (that we have begun working on) and our marketing plans and programs for next year and beyond.

Just as we would do for our clients.

And no more cobblers children stories.