Prospecting Tip: Identify Marketing Crimes And Proactively Solve Them
The original “Marketing Crimes” letter to RadioShack.
Ad agencies can feel pretty helpless when it comes to prospecting. Cold calling doesn’t work. Email marketing is like shooting fish in the wrong barrel. So agencies just pray they’re invited to a pitch by a brand or pitch consultant. But there’s another way. A way that puts the power back into the agency’s hands. The odds of success are still pretty low, but they’re better than cold calls or emails. I call it the “Marketing Crimes” prospecting approach.
marketing crimes prospecting
Put simply, this approach involves identifying a brand committing what you believe to be a marketing crime in the marketplace and then addressing it in some powerful way. For example, you may see an ad campaign on TV where the concept is decent, but the writing is terrible (for me Plymouth Rock’s “The Bostonians” campaign fits this bill). Marketing crime! Or you see a brand’s sales are struggling but have an idea how they could grow their business. Marketing crime! Or maybe you see an ad campaign where the consumer insight is lame or flat out wrong. Marketing crime!
Now, gather your team together and articulate what the marketing crime is, exactly, and how you’d fix it. I’m not suggesting writing new scripts or creating storyboards. That’ll require too many resources and, therefore, adds too much risk. Just articulate the crime and how you’d approach fixing it. And then decide your best channel to communicate your perspective.
Pick a channel.
Could be a blog post. Here’s one I did targeting Peloton entitled, “Ideas To Bring Peloton Back To Prominence.” I like the blog approach because even if your target company never sees it, other brands presumably will. And seeing your proactivity and (hopefully) smart insight in the post, more people will be impressed. But if you ask your followers to help get this blog post to the right person at the brand, it might just get there. Or use LInkedIn Salesforce to find the right people at the company and send them a message with a link to the blog post.
The other way to do it is to send a letter directly to the CMO of that brand (and cc the CEO). This is a much more aggressive approach, but virtually guarantees they will see your point-of-view. I’m talking a physical, old-school letter on your agency’s letterhead that explains your perspective. Then send it via FedEx so you can be certain it will get to the person. Follow up with phone calls a day later or emails and see what happens.
My $250,000,000 letter.
Here’s a true story and the very first Marketing Crimes letter I ever sent. In fact, it sorta kicked off this genre of prospecting for me. The $250 million RadioShack account went into review while I was Director of Business Development at Arnold Worldwide. The marketing crime? We were not invited to the pitch! And at that time Arnold was pretty famous for dusting off old, tired brands. I couldn’t believe we weren’t invited.
So I did a smidge of research one afternoon and wrote the pitch consultant a letter from Arnold’s CMO at the time, Phil Reilly, that made the case to include Arnold. It was VERY direct and VERY critical of the RadioShack brand. I told them the brand wasn’t relevant anymore and that it needed to stop trying to be a big-box retailer in a small box. Here’s one paragraph:
What if RadioShack’s stores were smaller for a reason? What if they were smaller because we can tuck smaller stores into more places that are more convenient for consumers to run in and out of (6,864 stores that are five minutes from 94% of all Americans is a killer support point). What if RadioShack’s selection wasn’t “limited,” but realistic (pardon the pun) to consumers’ true needs and, therefore, pre-filtered by a true authority (RadioShack). What if RadioShack told consumers that they don’t want to sell you everything, but just want you to buy what you need.
We not only got into the pitch as the 21st agency, we went on to win, riffing on the themes in the original letter. The client then framed the letter I sent as a little trophy (see image at top of page). Boy did we ever get drunk after that unlikely win.
You have nothing to lose.
You already don’t have the marketing criminal’s business, so making a play like this has no downside to the agency. In fact, it’s really fun to do. It mobilizes a team around an interesting problem, it makes you and your team feel liberated and uncalculated, and best of all it’s one way to put the power back into the agency’s hands.
And it just might work.
Will Burns is a fractional brand consultant and Founder & CEO of the revolutionary virtual-idea-generating company, Ideasicle X. He’s an advertising veteran from such agencies as Wieden & Kennedy, Goodby Silverstein, Arnold Worldwide, and Mullen. He was a Forbes Contributor for nine years writing about creativity in modern branding. Sign up for a video consultation through my Intro Page.
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