The essence of being a client: he receives a service and returns money. There are customers and clients.

The customer relationship can be passive. To buy a frying pan, I only have to touch my I-pad screen twice. I barely realized it myself.

Does this work when buying creative work too? Nope.

Even with full service agencies, active customer engagement is required. This is how the best work is created.

What is expected of the customer?

Helping the agency understand the business, working with them as if they were colleagues, passing on news-even the unpleasant ones, helping them seize opportunities; being busy making the right lead every time. In other words, help them help you.

Yes, but then there is just as much work in being a client as there is in being an agency….

That’s true. The agency serves the client, but the client serves the agency just as well. So it is also the other way around.

This “active reciprocity of service” also applies internally. For example, the internal client of “a client” is Marketing. Do you want Communication to score maximum? Then play them appropriately. Help them help you.

Project management, account, everybody within an agency is of course there to serve Creation, but that too is the other way around. Do you tell them what it takes to make something great? What are you doing to make sure they can shine?

You can pull this thought horizontally through the creative communications sector, but also vertically.

Managers have employees; doing everything alone is impossible. These people offer their services every day in exchange for money. You can think of the supervisor as the employee’s client. This is eminently the other way around, where it is about development, career opportunities and being happy campers together.

Now you’re thinking: yes, but #however!
Ask each other!

Or ask someone who is now using her new frying pan to make Ottolenghi’s Superflans….

Put ‘em all on in 2024!