Tribe

BRAND PERSONA

Our brand isn’t here to be everything to everyone.

Age: 55
Title: CMO (competent marketing leader with a team)
Family: Married w/ 2 kids in college
Location: Suburbs
Gender: Female

Sally

  • Certain % for overall company growth

    Attract appropriate audience (number of target accounts)

    Increase customer retention

    Optimize customer lifecycle

    Upsell and cross-sell

    Balance internal and external team resources

    Differentiate from competition

    Improve brand reputation and awareness

  • Stakeholder demands/misunderstanding of marketing

    Lack of team resources

    Challenges in tech stack/ IT Support

    Not enough budget for demands

    Cross-departmental communications/internal alignment (sales/ops/marketing/C-suite)

    Complicated market segment - complex industry

    Sales team misalignment/not following up on leads

  • Team augmentation; support to get things done; hands on deck

    Additional expertise/deep and wide that is hard to do on an internal team

    Fresh thinking/ideas. Internal teams can tend to be focused on operations

    May need strategy (personas, foundational messaging, differentiators, competitive analysis, etc.)

  • Type A, high achiever, assertive

    Multitasker

    Strategic thinker - high level

    Business person who does marketing

  • Attributions of success from strategy

    See their team grow/learn

    Bottomline growth

    Company/leadership recognition

    Obtain internal alignment on key initiatives/messaging

  • Understanding of business

    Ability to keep pace

    Fresh ideas and proactive thinking

    Ability to report on ROI/show results of work

  • WSJ

    Forbes CMO Network

    Meetups

    Harvard Business Review

    LinkedIn

    AdWeek/BrandWeek

    SC Biz News

    Greenville Journal

    Post Courier

    Greenville News

    Upstate Business Journal

After some conversation with senior leadership, our CMO realizes she needs external marketing support

The Realization

Journey Map

The company has solid market share, but it’s been slowly eroding away over the years due to encroaching competition

The company needs to arrest this decline and even more - regain market share. They have created two product extensions that will enhance the user experience and recapture lost customers

The Reason

Finding an agency partner was no easy decision. Internally, her team wants to work on this new rollout, but they are still fairly mid-level and they already have a lot on their plates

Plus, the CMO and senior leadership want some fresh, external perspective and are looking for an agency partner with senior leadership and experience

The Rationale

There is a lot riding on this. She has to identify the right agency partner because the company wants to rollout these products this year, And there's so much to do (research, naming, design, advertising, PR).

She asks around, she looks online, she reviews websites and LinkedIn profiles. In an ideal world, she wants to work with just one agency. She needs branding, creative, social, PR and media. She's also worried about the internal roll out. How can she show senior leadership that the new brand she is creating fits within the larger brand? Should she do research to validate that what the agency creates will resonate? She needs someone who has done this before, knows what they are doing, and can provide the strategic guidance that she needs. Someone who can scale with her from ideation, to launch, to support.

So many agencies did branding, but not media and PR. That was frustrating. It took weeks, but finally she has a short list of five agencies she's going to reach out to. Two seem to have the “right stuff,” and three are ok. Her goal is to get it down to three in-person reviews."

The Research

She has outlined criteria for selection: must have the experience she is looking for, senior level team, reasonable investment and most importantly - people she would want to work with.

She starts with a project brief outlining the scope, goals, budget, timing, and expectations. She sends that to her five agencies and has a Q&A period. The proposals are due and she had her selection team review the submissions

They easily narrow the field down to two and decide on a third finalist. These teams will be presenting in person to her selection committee.

The Review