We’ve started a somewhat unusual collaboration with SHARE NOW Hungary two years ago.
Tamás Gábor, their Head of Marketing was spearheading the efforts of basically merging his team and our teams, and he even asked us to do the same internally with media and creative. We took some time to reflect and share the key learnings with you.
Tasks at the Marketing department keep changing and evolving, just like the company, our offering, and our competition does. These all influence how a team works. Thus the role of the agency becomes multi-faceted and it keeps changing as well.
The agency has a supporting role, a consultative role, and is a part of a checks and balances system. And there are situations in which the whole process is turned upside down: something has to happen so fast, that we write the copy ourselves, and the agency approves it. We rely on the agency with the projects that are tough to crack. The easy ones we can probably solve well – but they can still tell us if they have a better solution for the same challenge.
By the way, the same mindset is true for our whole organization. Delivering the best customer experience and value, at an accessible price – that’s what we’re all about. So our finance department, customer service, colleagues who make sure that our cars are available to customers in the right place, at the right time, in the right quality – also contribute greatly to the whole experience, in various and versatile roles.
1.
Roles change. And that’s a feature, not a bug.
In a fluid ecosystem like this, do you have to have strict roles to adhere to, or just the opposite?
Nobody can and should work without knowing the whys. (Of course there’s confidentiality, but let’s put that aside. And then there’s the amount of information which is simply overwhelming, you shouldn’t go there either.) Anyway, I prefer to give everyone reasons, not tasks. On the flip side, I have to understand their motivations as well, whether it’s my team or the agency’s. They have their own motivations, their own learning curve and priorities – besides doing great work. I have to nurture this engagement.
This doesn’t mean unconditional professional trust. I’ve heard this in a podcast from the CEO of Airbnb, so it’s not me being this smart: when you start collaborating, your glass is half full, in terms of trust. Then you start adding or subtracting from that.
2.
Look for reasons and motivations
If you blur the lines between teams, should everyone know everything?
3.
It’s okay to go behind the client’s back
Should media and creative talk and align without involving you, or just the opposite?
Definitely the former. It’s like an equation, how much you spend and what’s the quality of the output. We might contribute to a relatively minor increase in quality, but it would require a disproportionate amount of time on our side. And since the trust is there, and I can still review and discuss the aligned proposal, it’s the most effective, hence the best that they align.
You should let the agency work on its own. If not, they cease to be an agency.
That’s tough. There are external factors shaping the ecosystem in which the brand and the company exist, then there are the internal ones, especially whether and how we can adapt to these, and then there’s our mindset on how long we stick to the plan.
Of course you have to have a solid foundation, as a constant. Strategy and your growth trajectory should stay intact. That’s why it’s important that we carved the SHARE NOW Hungary strategy in stone not just internally, but together with creative and media in the summer of 2020, which we follow since then with annual measurement and reviews. Then there are the biggest milestones in your yearly roadmap, which shouldn’t be up for debate either, ideally.
But on top of all this, you have room to wiggle. In this stage of growth, in this state of our industry, we’re constantly being pushed to alter our plans. Decisions are made based on data, both in business and in media, which is a great breeding ground for human creativity, ideas that we can truly believe in. Sometimes they work – sometimes they don’t.
But it is essential not to call it a mistake if a campaign does not work. We’ve been there many times. That’s not an issue, since we do most things for the first time in this industry at this stage. When the product is constantly being experimented on you have to do the same with the campaigns. You just have to be quick to recognize that something doesn’t work – and, very importantly, you should use media that accommodates to this need.