How Effective Are We?
We recently won another couple of Design Effectiveness Awards, which takes our tally of DEAs to ten since 2009. Six golds, three silvers and one bronze.
This news coincided with a book I was reading about how agencies need to be clear about what differentiates them from the countless other firms out there.
Effectiveness is very important to us and we think it helps with our differentiation when talking to clients. But the book got me thinking. Rather than referring to the DEA agency league table, which is pretty meaningless, I wondered if we could objectively quantify just how effective we are, using the DEA entries as a data source?
Turns out we can.
An analysis of our 10 entries reveals that the three most common ‘results’ across the board are: sales impact, performance in relation to market and return on investment. A quick spreadsheet and a spot of number crunching reveals that, on average, we’ve delivered these clients some very impressive figures...
Average impact on their brand sales: +47%
Average performance of their brand in relation to their market: +40%
Average return on investment: 2,888%
Now, I’m not jumping ahead of myself here. I know we’re looking at a self-selecting set of projects, which don’t reflect the majority of the work we do here at Good. But, the difference is, when we do get the opportunity to measure our work objectively, with a client who’s willing, we grab it. We know what to look for, which questions to ask and which factors to isolate. It’s becoming part of our make up. That’s what counts and that’s what I’m enormously proud of. And I think it’s a really effective differentiator.
So, the next time a potential client asks if we can justify our fee proposal, we can proudly say that our effectiveness track record suggests we’ll increase their sales by almost half, outperform their market sector by 40% and make their money back many, many times over. And we can prove it. How Good is that?