How to infuse startup culture into the client-agency relationship

Originally published in The Guardian newspaper on May 28, 2015.

Focusing on the user and iteration could make for more positive and fruitful relations between agencies and clients.

Startups scurry to solve new problems in hopes of creating new markets or disrupting existing ones. They strategise for aggressive financial and geographic growth. That’s what makes them special: those that succeed really succeed.

Two central ways in which startups operate – strong user-centricity (putting the end user first in all aspects of design and output) and a focus on iteration – are fast becoming entrenched principles at leading digital agencies. This startup-like culture and methodology is enabling clients and agencies to maintain a responsive posture.

But agency work can be limited to a client’s wish lists. While these lists are a good starting point, they leave little room for boldness. This unearths a tension in our industry ̶– how can agencies raise the bar if a client already knows what they want? How should clients and agencies react when a campaign doesn’t achieve its goals? There must be a better way.

The answer, we think, lies in startup culture. Successful agency and client relationships will increasingly depend on the principles of user-centricity and iteration.

Meet your new boss: the user

For startups, customer validation is core to the development of a new and disruptive product. It proves (or disproves) the viability of the startup’s concept and helps validate its market.

For this to work in adland, agencies and clients must agree on the primacy of the user. A user-centric focus should also help agencies vet prospective clients. With user-centricity established, agencies and clients are free to select users, host testing sessions and interview users throughout product planning and development.

With this approach, users are effectively embedded in the development of any platform or campaign, but their usability is also vital. Customers must be able to easily and effectively understand concepts, agree on their relevancy and accomplish the associated tasks (as frivolous or utilitarian as they may be) as quickly as possible.

Failing your way to success

Clients must plan for a comfortable amount of experimentation and testing. Structuring the master services agreement and statement of work to accommodate retained cycles of building, measuring and learning is a vital starting point. Then, as the product develops, you will build an invaluable storehouse of ideas and behaviours for future prototyping and creative. Not only will this create a better product or campaign, it will inspire optimism in both client and agency to imagine two, three and four versions ahead.

While traditional business culture abhors failure, progressive firms welcome the learning outcomes of failure as an integral part of their creative process. The success of a product or campaign hinges on a client and agency’s ability to close this culture-gap and embrace failure. Ultimately, failure begets a campaign’s continued evolution towards the user’s wants and needs.

Different models

It’s worth noting some key differences between startups and clients. Traditional agency clients are, in ways, more sophisticated and better resourced than startups. However, they can suffer from overexposure to their own messaging. Bureaucracy may also keep decision-makers at arm’s length from their customers. Another difference is impact; the stakes are much higher when your user base is so large. Bringing startup culture to agency and client relationships is often as difficult as it sounds.

Startups, on the other hand, are only too enthusiastic to learn about their users: to flex their messaging, products and experiences accordingly. In the future, winning agencies will bridge this gap. They will foster collaborative creativity, user-centric product development and constant, persistent iteration for brands. This requires – of agencies and clients alike – the brashness and bravery of the most disruptive entrepreneur.

This is an edited extract of a feature first published in the SoDA report 2015

Jordan Eshpeter is head of client engagement and Claire Atkin is client engagement manager at Invoke Media