Web Designer Magazine – Career Path Series

An interview with Felix Velarde, Managing Director, Underwired and Jason Holland, Creative Director, Underwired

WD: What is the key advice that you would give to a designer that is thinking about starting his or her own studio?

JH: Be creative but relevant - for each pitch or portfolio item, have a business case for why or how your creativity will increase the clients return on investment and not just look great.

FV: And concentrate on doing the best work you can do. If you are the lead creative, be the lead creative – don’t get bogged down in production work. Your time is more valuable even if given free if you’re producing work that inspires clients.

WD: What prompted you to set up your own agency?

JH: The feeling that I not only knew where I could take my own career, but where I could take the industry. It was at a time of my life that I could 'risk all' and put everything into a new venture, with Felix Velarde as the Entrepreneurial skill and my creative vision.

FV: I've done this four times successfully now, the last two with Jason (our previous agency became the digital arm of Lowe). The key driver was having a vision of how we felt design for marketing could and should be - and really wanting the freedom to realise that vision. Doing it for ourselves meant we could concentrate on high quality without the baggage of projects we didn't want but working for someone else would have inherited.

WD: Do you think the current business climate is conducive with setting up a new digital design agency?

JH: Yes - but there are far more small companies (as a percentage of the whole) than large agencies than there have been, so clarity for what you do is very important.

FV: If you get it right - yes. There are very few overheads for a small company, you can be lean and focused, and operating in a recession will give you skills that will stand your in good stead once it's over.

WD: Should new digital agencies specialise or offer a full service?

JH: I believe in specialists, even if it's just what is seen from the view of a possible client. Start small within your client's organisation and prove your worth - then you can offer your wider set of services. For example, we are famous for our eCRM expertise, but this encompasses lots of disciplines like email, websites and social. The platform of real strategic insight into customers has opened all sorts of doors for us.

FV: Full service comes with scalable processes, and that makes it almost impossible for a small agency to compete with an established operation. I agree with Jason - if you specialise everyone knows what you do, and if a client needs that, they know who to turn to.

WD: What skills do you wish you had when you started your studio?

JH: Delegation - I'm still working on it 16 years later!

FV: I wish I'd understood Gross Margin Percent - it would have made life an awful lot easier in the beginning.

WD: What would you have done differently when you set up your agency?

JH: Nothing - even the big mistakes have shaped what I do and how I do it today.

FV: I'd have sought out a mentor sooner. Having an experienced hand to give you advice and steer you towards opportunity and away from catastrophe, even if it costs a few grand a year, is well worth it. 

Nudge Factor

Yet another unrepeatable offer! Bang, Flash!! 25% off today only!!! Ugh. We recently lost a pitch. Not a huge one, but the client was nice, the brand was fascinating and the task was really quite challenging. The client didn't go for us. Or rather they liked us and loved our work but were sold by another agency who offered them a whopping great discount on an email marketing campaign based on some hard-hitting promotions. Which sort of goes to show that on occasion, when you've got one chance at a sale, making the Big Offer is often the best course of action.

Being bitter of course rarely gets you where you want to go. It does make for a very excellent basis for an article which is all about what not to do if you have a marketing, rather than a selling, job to do. And you're reading this because you're in marketing, after all. You may even run email marketing campaigns. I am sincerely hoping you may actually run eCRM programmes, or even better, want to transform email marketing into eCRM and then evolve that into multichannel eCRM. Which is about more than just a series of offers - it's about building relationships around value exchanges that are mutual, and which actually lead somewhere.

Let's start at the beginning for a minute, if you'll indulge me. ECRM is about the journey you take your customers on. Segmentation allows you to create a meaningful, relevant journey for each distinct customer type. In my own business we focus on what we call 3D segmentation - who, what and why, with the "effectiveness" dimension having been beautifully articulated as far back as 1972 when 'need states' were beginning to be discussed seriously as a component of marketing. (If your agency produces personas, they're probably at about 1983, a terrible year for music.) This customer journey takes the form of a series of incremental steps from the first moment they self-identify to the moment they stop ever being a customer, prospect or advocate. Put yourself now in the customer's shoes on this journey. How many times in a row will you want, or tolerate, a 25% off offer? And how many times will you see one before you start to think that's the normal price?

Imagine you're a brand like Domestos (forgive me Unilever, I plucked it out of thin air). You can hit your potential customers with offers all day every day, and quite a lot of them will work - or at least when Joe has already decided they need a bottle of cleaner an offer might either sway them from own-brand, or reduce the margin from someone who would otherwise pay full price. But Domestos is a premium brand. Discounting is not the way to become successful. Discounting is the way that economies rebalance themselves, it's not the way companies make money because it's much more about fundamental survival. Domestos must look to other ways to engage with customers. ECRM with its customer journey and relevance and, ideally, with an understanding of what makes the customer tick, provides this opportunity.

Because really an offer on its own does not make Domestos interesting or engaging, it just makes it cheaper.

We create customer journeys on the basis of the nudge. The nudge says to a customer, because we understand something of the considerations in your life, here's something of a little value, in exchange for a few moments of your attention. If we can do this with some charm, a modicum of relevance and a dash of intelligence, we might get to engage their attention... and if we can get it really right, this may snowball into increased consideration, purchase frequency and even - gasp! - loyalty.

Imagine you're, say, a cleaning brand(!). How about singling out mums with young children. With permission to contact mum, perhaps obtained (and here I may sound a little hypocritical) through some kind of one-off promotion, we could use this demographic insight to plot some engagement. In Keystages 1 and 2 (and later) kids start to learn about hygiene. Perhaps over the course of three months we could send mum on a journey where our value exchange is all about providing her with a heads up about what her kids will be learning, followed by some materials so she can support the learning they do at school when they get home, with some fun activities (preferably not ones which increase her workload, and especially ones which involve creating a mess the kids might run away from!). Follow-the-curriculum, colouring-in activities, downloadables, uploadables, word games - I'm sure you can think of a whole string of things you can give mum which will help her help her kids keep healthy. Not to mention having a cleaner house as a bonus...

It's a series of nudges along a journey to brand loyalty. And you don't really ever need to do any selling. You don't need to say 'Domestos keeps your house safe' out loud, it's implicit in the exchanges of value and values you've transacted with your customer along the way. At some point, one of the little nudges may even involve a voucher or a promotion, just to cement the relationship. You may give them a social space they can meet other mums in too, so long as you listen to their advice to you and you respond in a manner consistent with your brand's values.

ECRM is, or at least never ever should be, about banging on about buy buy buy (I was going to say "Harpic on" but that would have been a bad pun too far). It's about nudging, gently, so your customer wants to go on your journey with you. Because if you can take customers on your journey, while the discount merchants may sacrifice margin for survival, you'll have loyalty delivering straight to the bottom line.

Why my love of Ben & Jerry's isn't over just yet

Over the past couple of weeks there's been quite a bit of buzz about Ben & Jerry's dropping email in favour of social media. It stemmed from an email sent by their UK people to email subscribers, letting them know the monthly moosletter was being canned and asking recipients to fan them on Facebook. It's not quite switching off email (they'll use it still for special promotions) but it's pretty close. According to the quite rightly other-side-of-the-story article, Ben & Jerry's in Vermont isn't following this particular herd, and will carry on regardless.

I commented on the story as originally reported when it broke. My view is that a move to drop an entire marketing channel seems insane for a brand that appeals to people who like ice cream - kids, hippies, adults, old folk, squares alike. We all love Ben & Jerry's. Almost everyone out of their teens uses email. Indeed some kids and teens still use it (though the XML channels r00l increasingly). For instantaneous interaction between a brand and an audience there's nothing quite like social media. For longer-term, planned engagement based on deep understanding of behaviour/demographic/motivation-based segmentation, there's nothing (yet) quite like email.

Where email, and its grown-up cousin eCRM, comes in at its best is in shifting brand perception. A well-paced, well-segmented eCRM campaign over eight months can be persuasive in a way that an ad campaign cannot. You can make a case through demonstrating an experience and involving people in a journey that you cannot do by being interactive or sociable. I think social media channels are brilliant for maintaining and reinforcing a brand's positioning, adding a layer of openness for instance. And I think eCRM is exceptional for changing behaviours through understanding motivation and basing communications on that understanding. Email, SMS and the web can be segmented in a way that is invisible to users. The same cannot yet be said of the Facebook experience.

I am sad that ben & Jerry's has decided to focus entirely on the ephemeral in the UK, at the cost of a long-term brand engagement strategy. It's all gone a bit tactical. And when Facebook fades they'll have to jump on the next big thing. I think it's shortsighted. Customers are, or at least should be, forever. I'll be a Ben & Jerry's customer for as long as I remember its well-meaning roots. But as I'll never be a fan on Facebook it's going to be tricky for them to keep reminding me why I love their brand.