First it was our turn to talk. Now we look at a client’s perspective…

We are half way through rebuilding our own value proposition, with the guidance of our VP expert.

In Stage One, we discussed the importance of employee engagement and described how our own VP began with a short client survey.

This was swiftly followed up with a handful of independent, client perception interviews, to help measure client satisfaction and understand if clients also see the same differentiators as we do as employees (to look beyond our agency perspective and to the client’s perception).

The interviews were conducted over the telephone, and in confidence, by an independent person.

A series of questions were asked, such as ‘What problem did you come to OB with?’, ‘Where or who else did you consider instead?’ and ‘What do you perceive as OB’s strengths?’

Some interesting insights were unearthed…

Discoveries

‘Creative’, ‘visionary’, ‘connection’, ‘personal’, ‘approachable’ and ‘knowledgeable’ were a few of the words our clients associate with OB.

Something that became very clear is that when we win work over our competitors, clients choose us because of our ability to understand the their problem swiftly and accurately.

Our key strengths highlighted by clients were a mixture of the services we offer and our approach to applying them, as well as the breadth of skills that our small team can provide.

Other key strengths highlighted in the results included the personal attention we give to clients, our understanding, experience, guidance, our collaborative working style, design and value for money.

Challenges

When it came to exploring our brand positioning, it seems our size can be a disadvantage – not necessarily for our own contacts, but when it comes to “selling in” to an organisation.

Part of our challenge is to fight preconceptions such as “a large corporation needs to go with a large company to do their branding work” and “my boss would say OB aren’t big enough to do that!”

We know that neither of these theories is true; but we think that by providing potential clients with more case studies, we could actually provide evidence of this (something we recognise and will improve going forward). A case study about our recent branding work that we recently completed for a client (worth £4.5bn!), for example, should certainly help to dispel any illusions that we are too small to brand for big companies!

The overall impression

In conclusion to Stage Two, we are proud to report that our clients value us just as highly as we value them: “The brand loyalty you command is strong and is not the norm for an agency,” one respondent said.

Our next steps now are to use this information, plus the output from the workshop and a review of our competitor websites, in order to build a strong, compelling value proposition that will build on our existing strengths and help us to eliminate our weaknesses.

Check out our next blog over the coming weeks for Stage Three of the VP process.

Alternatively, to find out more about how we can help you define your value proposition, contact our Marketing Manager, Natasha French, by email at natasha.french@oceanbarefoot.com or call us on 020 8390 0035.