Cannes Lions Festival: Inspiring Your Clients
So far, the Cannes Lions Festival has been very exciting! Between the awards ceremonies, seminars, classes, workshops and panel discussions, there’s so much creativity and inspiration all in one place. Being here is also a chance to see old friends in the industry and make new ones.
Speaking of friends, today I attended an interesting “Master Class” titled Five Secrets for Inspiring Your Clients, presented by Mary Beth West, Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer of Kraft Foods, Inc. Mary Beth started her discussion with a bold statement, “I hate being called a client because it’s formal and clinical. I prefer to be thought of as a friend.”
Mary Beth values the power of personal relationships, which are at the heart of the partnerships she can count on. With every relationship, there’s give and take, and here are the five things Mary Beth is looking for from her agencies partners:
1) Teach us something new: Our role at agencies is to be out there, exploring the world and bringing that learning and creativity back into the company.
2) Don’t digitally bug us – talk to us:
Technology is all around us, but you can’t forget that emails don’t inspire, people and their ideas do. Be present!
3) Get to know us without blinders on:
Take the time to get to know who we are and what we do as broadly as possible.
4) Look outside the category for inspiration: Find an analog in a category the brand is aspiring to and get to know it. Mary Beth shared the work Kraft did with Crystal Light — how they looked at it as a health and beauty brand vs. a simple drink which inspired the team to reach outside the usual confines, and spend a day at the Fashion Institute of Technology, tour beauty and fashion retailers and work with a design team that specialized in beauty not beverages. As an agency that specializes in marketing-to-women, BRAVO for getting the Crystal Light brand’s “reinvigoration” so right!
5) Move it forward fast: In today’s marketing world, the need for rapid innovation is ever present. Mary Beth talked about “hot house” ideation sessions that Kraft has held where teams spend two or three days together and run through three steps, Stimulate, Ruminate and Activate, coming out ready to go with an idea.
Who could argue with a CMO wanting these five things from her agency partners? These “secrets” are at the core of building supportive and sustainable relationships with our client partners, and are tenets to live by.
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PR Week, Cannes Lions, Marketing, MMC, PR, public relations, marketing to women, Marina Maher Communications
