Organizations thoughtfully designed to run lean, easily adapt to changing priorities, and produce remarkable work at the speed of modern marketing, have an advantage over others.

They have clear, actionable rules of engagement for how they will and won’t operate. 

They’ve channeled these rules into a written set of operating principles to guide their people and business affairs and benefit tremendously. You may think your firm or agency has what I’m describing, but I’ve observed that most do not. Read on for examples and a way to put your organization to the test.

What do we mean by ‘operating principles’?

Operating principles create a shared internal mindset for how teams think, act and make decisions about their daily work. They are critical for alignment and smooth scalability. While “principles” is often used interchangeably with “values,” there’s a significant difference.

What are values? 

Company values define your culture. Firms and agencies typically present their values as a list of qualities or phrases that reflect how their people treat each other. 

Here are some examples that I’ve pulled from a variety of creative marketing firms:

• Integrity, accountability, listening, simplifying, persevering, collaborating.
• “Create amazing work,” “Be honest,” “Share your voice,” “Be bold and brave,” “Deliver value.”

It’s helpful for an organization to communicate how they believe people should interact with each other. However, the average list of values is not actionable, memorable or even differentiating. Principles intentionally differ.

What are principles?

Principles reflect your organization’s philosophies and beliefs about how your firm or agency should and should not operate. They are the line in the sand defining the things you will always do and those you will never do. 

Principles should not prescribe — they are not a “how to” instruction manual, leaving room for autonomy. But they should be actionable enough to guide how people think, act and make daily business decisions. 

As an example, if we took the value “be honest” from the values above and wrote it as a principle, we might say: 

• Tell the truth no matter what the cost. 

As a written, defined principle, it draws a line in the sand. I’ll share more examples and a way to test the strength of your own organization’s principles in a moment.

Competitive advantages from operating principles

You can gain many advantages from using a principles-based approach to leading your marketing organization.

• New team members can rely on your principles to guide their decisions.
• You’ll have consistency in the way people approach their daily work. 
• You’ll reduce the need for managerial oversight and prescriptive direction.
• You’ll be able to scale more smoothly without negatively impacting speed or quality.
• They differentiate your firm or agency and generate a competitive advantage.

Principles are critical for alignment and smooth scalability.

“If you focus on principles, you empower everyone who understands those principles to act without constant monitoring or controlling.”  

– Stephen R. Covey

In addition, when a creative marketing firm or in-house agency has strong operating principles about the quality of their work, their teams know when to push back on a client’s request if it conflicts with their principles.

To the team, being accountable to their principles is more important than being accountable to their clients. As a result, they are more comfortable saying no to unreasonable budgets or deadlines or uninformed requests from stakeholders to change their creative direction.

Relevant examples of operating principles

Here are some operating principles from creative marketing firms and other organizations.

TBWA

Referring to themselves as the “Disruption company,” TBWA’s principles help them “achieve the diverse, inclusive lens in our work and create real-world impact.” 

They state that their principles are the “standards we measure ourselves against; the standards we hold each other accountable to; the standards getting us where we want to go.”

Massive Change Network

This global design consultancy takes a different approach. They live by “The Incomplete Manifesto for Growth,” a list of 43 principles with explanations of each.

RedScout

The brand innovation consultancy, RedScout, lists five principles they use to drive meaningful change.

37signals

37signals, the makers of Basecamp and Hey, share their principles to guide internal communication.

Future Forum

Future Forum is a consortium focused on helping organizations build flexible, inclusive and connected ways of working. They have collected samples of principles being used across various companies to reshape how those companies work — specifically, to develop their flexible work models. 

How to define a set of principles

Since your principles will guide how your creative marketing firm or in-house agency operates, you should take a strategic approach to draft them. Consider the following questions:

• What type of service experience do your clients expect from you?
• What do your current and prospective employees expect from you?
• How do technology and digital channels impact your work and your target market?

1. Define principles that help you meet the expectations of your clients

Over the past several years, client-side brand and marketing leaders have increasingly evaluated creative marketing firms based on criteria beyond capabilities and creativity. Client-side marketers are becoming more focused on how creative and marketing firms operate, per the 2018-2019 Global Digital Outlook Study by the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) in partnership with Forrester Research. They want partners who can deliver with greater speed, nimbleness and value.

• Speed of delivery had become a significant factor in whether or not creative marketing firms won new projects. 
• A “more flexible and nimble working model” was cited as a top area of improvement that marketing clients wanted to see from their creative marketing partners. 
• And “price vs. value” was cited as the top reason clients terminate a partner relationship. They wanted greater value from their agencies. 

I’ve seen similar data reported in other industry research and regularly hear similar stories firsthand in my consulting work with creative marketing firms. Some have also shared that they’ve lost clients due to delivery speed. For them, it has become normal to receive RFPs and RFIs from client-side marketers with questions about their firm’s process, turnaround times and how they collaborate.

Whether you’re a creative marketing firm or an in-house agency, consider how you can draft your principles to help you meet your client’s demand for speed, nimbleness and value.

2. Define principles that help you meet the expectations of your creative talent

Many years before the pandemic, there was already a lot of talk about the “future of work.” Businesses applied the principles and frameworks of different future work movements to redesign their organizations.

Some examples of the movements and frameworks that have been reshaping how companies work are:

• Re:Work.
• Holacracy.
• Sociocracy.
• Teal.
• Responsive.org.
• Lean.
• Agile.

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of many values behind these movements and some of their practices. But, if you were to study these movements, you’d learn they are largely about giving people what they need to deliver great work. 

Some of the shared values behind these movements are:

• Trust.
• Transparency.
• Autonomy.
• Adaptability.
• Co-creation.
• Continuous improvement.
• Work-life balance.

An increasing number of companies are making significant changes to apply these values and create work environments that appeal to your talent pool. Can you afford not to do the same? 

When drafting your principles, consider how they can help you align your firm or agency with these values.

3. Define principles that help you adopt technology for a competitive advantage

Most marketing organizations focus on digital and online marketing channels, but many haven’t adapted to keep up with the variety, volume or velocity of content needed. Instead, they’ve continued business as usual or slightly adjusted their operating model. As a result, they’ve been building up what Steve Blank called organizational debt.

Organizational debt happens when a business grows but doesn’t invest the necessary time and energy toward adapting how it operates to keep it running smoothly. The firm or agency is too focused on just getting work done. Then, one day, they step back and realize they have a set of performance challenges.

When drafting your principles, consider how they could help you take full advantage of existing and emerging technology.

4. Define principles to clarify what you will and won’t do

I’ll leave you with two last questions to answer as you consider drafting operating principles for your creative marketing firm or in-house team. 

• What will you always do to create remarkable work?
• What will you never do to create remarkable work?

Remember, a well-drafted principle will draw a clear line in the sand, defining the things you will always do and the things you will never do. 

How to test if you have clear, actionable principles

Here’s how you can put your creative marketing firm or in-house agency to the test. Whether you’re drafting principles for the first time or they already exist, evaluate them against the following questions. 

• Are they actionable?
• Will they help someone make a decision?
• Can you logically argue their opposite? 
• Are they differentiating?
• Are they polarizing?
• Do they create a competitive advantage?
• Will you stick to them even if it comes at a cost or disadvantage?

The more you can give the right answers to these questions, the stronger the principle. 

To further make the point, Bill Bernback, one of advertising’s greats and co-founder of the highly-ranked worldwide advertising firm DDB, famously said, “A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something.”

Wrapping up

Operating principles are a tremendous tool for creative marketing firms and agencies. I’ve seen their power firsthand in my work. However, the work doesn’t stop with drafting them. You’ll need to ensure everyone in your organization understands them and knows when to rely on them for guidance. Perhaps that’s a good topic for a future article.

The post How to define your marketing organization’s rules of engagement appeared first on MarTech.

• Proposition: Aligning and concentrating your marketing firm’s or in-house agency’s efforts with a focused vision, positioning strategy and value proposition. 
• Principles: Unifying people with a shared set of operating principles on how to lead, collaborate, communicate and make decisions in their work.
• People: Aligning organizational structure, staffing and professional development opportunities to deliver on vision, strategy and value proposition. 
• Process: Employing lightweight processes and tools for nimble ways of working.
• Performance: Measuring, analyzing and improving how your firm or in-house agency works. 

In this article, I’ll dive into “Proposition” and explain why aligning your organization’s efforts with a focused vision, positioning strategy and value proposition matters. I’ll also chart a course you can use to get started.

Building your foundation for focus

There is such a low barrier to opening a creative marketing firm today. Droves of talent are leaving agencies and opening their own firms or joining innovative talent communities and matchmaking marketplace. The market is saturated with creative and marketing service providers. 

We also have CMOs bringing increasing amounts of work internally. As a result, many in-house production studios have grown and evolved, expanding their services and becoming better known as in-house agencies.

To thrive in this environment, your organization must become a unique provider of focused expertise that others can’t replicate. It’s the only way to secure a market position safe from the sea of sameness.

Marketing clients seek well-positioned “best-in-class” partners with narrow and deep expertise more than a range of lower-value services. The days of providing all types of services to all kinds of clients are behind us.

Today, offering a wide variety of services doesn’t scale. It’s costly, inefficient and creates chaotic operating environments. 

Focus is what scales. With it, you can:

• Concentrate resources toward a coherent strategy.
• Quickly improve the skills of your people, your services and your internal ways of working because they’re focused on just one or a few specific solutions or services.
• Deploy people’s expertise across a large client base because they replicate the same focused service areas.
• Easily maintain alignment between strategy, operating model and day-to-day decisions.

Focus makes running your organization much easier and more profitable. You can produce better work, which helps with recruitment, employee morale and retention.

Developing a focused, differentiating positioning strategy

Successful creative marketing organizations align their resources around a focused and differentiating positioning strategy. They invest in expanding their unique expertise and what they’re best at, while shedding or outsourcing other costly or distracting capabilities. 

As a result, they gain a variety of benefits.

• For creative marketing firms:
  • A well-defined criteria for targeting ideal clients.
  • A stronger win ratio in new business because you are playing to your strengths.
  • Stronger pricing power.
  • Reduction of costs.
  • Better margins.
  • Clearer direction for how to spend time, money and resources.
  • A broader — not narrower — geographical market from clients seeking your expertise.
  • Fewer competitors saying they can do what you do.
• For in-house agencies:
  • Clarity on which internal clients you are best at serving.
  • Stronger client alignment on when and how to work with your team.
  • Easier to create opportunities to work on higher-value projects.
  • Increased credibility amongst stakeholders and clients.
  • Likely to be seen as a strategic partner.
  • Reduction of agency-wide costs.
  • Greater support and funding for staffing and tools.
  • Less overlap and competition with external firms.

Charting your course forward

To develop a focused, differentiating positioning strategy, start by answering these four questions. 

1. Who are our best customers? What markets or audiences do we know best?

Defining an effective positioning strategy means clearly defining and understanding your ideal customer — the types of clients you’re best suited to serve. 

This requires exploring your experience within different business categories, market segments, audiences and even business models, depending on the clients you’ve served.

It may help to identify the following:

• The product or service categories you serve and perform well.
• The distribution and delivery channels you serve best.
• The internal and external stakeholders you know best.
• The types of audiences and market segments you know better than anyone.
• The types of brands you serve best.

Creative marketing firm example

Agency Sacks has defined its who as “affluent consumers.” They can influence the affluent as the audience they know best. 

In-house agency example

ESPN’s CreativeWorks defines their who as sports fans, which makes perfect sense.

2. What are our core competencies? In which areas are we truly best-in-class?

You need to beyond identifying capabilities and find what it is you can deliver better in a dependable, differentiating way. 

Look into:

• Unique skills your team may possess.
• Communication channels you know best.
• Customer points of contact who you know best along the customer journey.
• Unique strategic assets you own.
• Outcomes your clients consistently seek from you.
• Benefits you can deliver repeatedly.

These are different ways of looking at the same question. Often, we can find a pattern by separating services into different skills and abilities. Then, we can reorganize them to tell a compelling story about where you are truly best in class.

Example

Tribe has focused their what to be on internal communications. Their direction also works with their who — the audience they know best are the employees of global and national brands. 

3. How are we different in the way we think? Do we have distinguishing approaches or philosophies?

This is how you identify the standards, values and beliefs by which your agency operates, serves clients and makes day-to-day decisions. It’s also about the proprietary approaches you bring to solving client problems.

Consider:

• The philosophies or beliefs that fuel how you work.
• The methods and approaches you use.
• Your “firsts” and major organizational milestones.
• Your access to specialized resources.
• Your beliefs about organizational design, structure or work environment.

Creative marketing firms and in-house agencies might be tempted to pick the answer to these questions as the basis of their strategy. It requires less focus and sacrifice than basing your strategy on the who or what questions. But going the easy way makes for a weak strategy. 

Only a few organizations truly have a philosophy or approach to their work that is uniquely their own.

Example 

TBWA is a great example of a positioning strategy that hinges on the question how. The firm owns the idea of disruption. No other agency can say they are the “Disruption” company as TBWA does. They have created disruption workshops, tools, a consultancy, disruption days and four books on the subject.

4. Why do we exist in the first place? What is our calling?

Without exception, the most notable marketing organizations have an ambitious reason for existing. They don’t let the market, competition or financials drive their reason for existing. 

What drives your group from the inside? Your purpose must be the center of who you are as an organization.

Why is the most difficult question to answer. To help define your calling, think about the following: 

• Beyond making money, what is our purpose?
• If our people were volunteers instead of employees, what would drive them to volunteer?
• What are the things we will always do?
• What are the things we will never do?
• What do we preach? 
• What are we against?
• What do we fight for?
• What would we want to achieve if we knew we could not fail?

Example

Common Good’s why is to make health and happiness accessible to anyone, so they fight for the brands that share this purpose.

Other examples of in-house agency positioning

In-house agencies will base their positioning on who they know best, which will be their company’s brands and respective customer bases. Some examples include:

• BBC Creative
• Anheuser Busch’s Draftline
• Google’s Creative Lab 5 or their Brand Studio EMEA

Many in-house agencies also design their organizations to be “full-service.” Therefore, they won’t typically limit their service offering to the degree that the what question requires to develop a strategic advantage against other service providers.

However, the question of what is still essential because it can be used to communicate the type of creative work an in-house agency is best suited to deliver. For example, are you best at production work or strategy and creative concepting?

Unfortunately, I’m unaware of any in-house agencies that answer how or why in a differentiating way on a publicly accessible website. If you have any examples to share, please let me know.

Next steps to becoming a high-performing marketing organization

By answering the questions above, you can define a positioning strategy to increase your organizations’ value and relevance. It will point the way toward how to design your operating model and bring your strategy to life.

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During the Second Industrial Revolution, Fredrick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management. His work was groundbreaking back then, providing new efficiency-driven practices for mass production.

But unfortunately, most companies still unknowingly apply the philosophies behind his thinking today, over 100 years later, to scale their operations. The reason? Because “we’ve always done it this way.” 

Taylor designed his practices for manufacturing in a stable, slow-moving, predictable world. He did not intend them for creative or marketing services. And he certainly did not create them for a world exploding with complexity from disruptive technology, online marketing channels and unpredictable consumer behaviors.

Creative and marketing professionals building and supporting today’s brands must be able to make fast decisions and respond quickly to market opportunities or crises. And with technology, it’s much easier to share information and collaborate in real-time.

Traditional ways of working are not as valuable as they once were. It’s the opposite; if those ways of working are too siloed or slow, they work against you.

You know you have an outdated operating model when…

A creative marketing firm or in-house team with an outdated operating model often has the following types of indicators:

• Client concerns about turn-around time.
• Siloed disciplines, poorly integrated work.
• Too many people in too many meetings.
• Significant rework, late delivery or high costs.
• Unclear roles and responsibilities.
• Inconsistent processes and quality.
• Lack of accountability, low team morale.

It’s time to break from legacy thinking and push toward new ways of reconfiguring your creative marketing firm or in-house agency.

Leave ‘business as usual’ and ‘best practices’ in the past where they belong

What got us here won’t help us reach the horizon we’re all heading for as modern, high-performing creative marketing firms or in-house agencies. But it’s tough to know where to begin introducing change when everyone has worked similarly for over a century. 

If you’re looking for best practices, you’re missing the opportunity in front of you. Your operating model should generate a competitive edge compared to the other service providers your clients or in-house customers could use. You won’t gain a differentiating advantage by copying what others have done, a.k.a., standardized “best practices.” 

The idea of a best practice — having a single method or technique superior to all others — is naive in today’s modern marketing environment. Best practices are the regurgitation of an approach meant to address a challenge or opportunity with a particular set of influencing factors at a specific moment in time.

The assumption is that your situation will be the same as all others and that you can apply cookie-cutter solutions and templated approaches. But in the complexity of today’s environment, we know there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution to even many of our most common problems. For those who take this approach, the result is often mediocrity.

Rather, we should develop our own evolving set of “next” practices built on a process that helps us continually improve how we work. While organizations still need guidance for alignment, we can achieve this by introducing a set of operating principles for high-performing agencies.

By using a principles-based approach, we can shift from rigid best practices and achieve a level of alignment balanced with adaptability. More on this shortly.

Dig deeper: Driving marketing at scale: People, processes, platforms and programs

Acknowledge the needs of today’s talent

Our talent and teams fuel our growth and competitive advantage. But our workforce has dramatically evolved from only one or two years ago. 

Today’s talent expects a new kind of day-to-day work experience. However, traditional management principles, organizational structures and processes don’t match up, making it difficult for many creative and marketing organizations to attract and retain top talent. We must adopt new ways of collaborating and driving these changes throughout our remote and hybrid teams. 

Modern leaders and managers also need help supporting their teams in a remote or hybrid environment. They need practical human-centric leadership tools to become “a liberating leader” — someone who unlocks the full potential of their people and, ultimately, their entire organization.

What a high-performing creative marketing firm or in-house agency looks like

High-performing creative marketing firms and in-house agencies focus on meeting the needs of a well-defined “right-fit” client. They:

• Deliver unique solutions and creative products based on their core competencies (what they’re best at).
• Avoid expending resources on other services they could do, but that wouldn’t be central to their service strategy.
• Align their people and operating model to deliver in a repeatable and predictable way. 
• Create an environment where people can find meaning and passion in their work.
• Shed siloed structures and traditional workflows and instead adopt new operating principles, value-driven teams and lightweight processes that improve the quality of work while reducing costs.

Leaders and managers create the space, time and sense of psychological safety for employees to test and debate new ways of working to produce the best work of their lives.

As a result, client and employee satisfaction soar and the creative marketing firm or in-house agency can grow, adapt and deliver at the speed of modern marketing.

The path to a high-performing operating model for creative marketing firms and in-house agencies

We can design a high-performing operating model for creative marketing firms and in-house teams by thoughtfully aligning the needs of your clients and in-house customers, employees and your business.

I view your operating model as five interconnected points on a map. The five points are:

• Proposition: How do you align and concentrate your creative marketing firm’s or in-house agency’s services with a focused vision, positioning strategy and value proposition? 
• Principles: How do you unify your people with a shared set of operating principles that guide them on how to lead, collaborate, communicate and make decisions related to their work?
• People: How do you align your organizational structure, staffing and professional development opportunities to deliver on your vision, strategy and value proposition? 
• Process: How do you employ lightweight processes and tools for nimble ways of working? 
• Performance: How do you measure, analyze and improve how your firm or in-house agency works? 

We can begin to map your Path to a High-Performing Operating Model by answering these questions. 

An adaptable, not linear, pathway forward

I offer The Path to a High-Performing Operating Model as an adaptable framework. That’s because every organization is different.

Your type of business, size, location, talent, digital maturity, clients, competitive landscape, resource constraints and more will all create a unique operating environment. And so, your organization’s challenges and goals should determine which points you invest in and the depth in which you do so. 

The framework is not meant to be followed linearly, but it is important that we understand each point informs and impacts the others that come after. Furthermore, as you optimize one point on the map, it will often happen at the expense of others. So, when introducing change, it’s always essential to evaluate the tradeoffs and impact to prioritize the next steps for your firm or agency.

And lastly, our work to optimize our operating model should be ongoing. You should revisit the different points on the map as your business grows and your market evolves.

How to adopt the Path to a High-Performing Operating Model

Over the next few months, I’ll share more about each point on the Path to a High-Performing Operating Model and how you can begin to adopt the framework for your organization. However, if you want help sooner, you may be interested in the Agency Wayfinder Program — integrated strategy and organizational design for creative and marketing firms.

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