Peace, love and psychological contracts

What’s so funny about peace, love and psychological contracts? asks Dominic Mills as he investigates the radical new lengths clients and agencies are going to to ensure better working relationships.

I apologise to any other fans of the fabulous Nick Lowe for bowdlerising the title of his best-known song (covered, almost note for note, by Elvis Costello), an affectionate late 70s piss-take of the hippie vibe that somehow became mainstream.

Of course, there is nothing funny about peace, love and understanding. And nor, despite the temptation to stifle a giggle, is there anything funny about the notion of a psychological framework that governs how two people, teams or organisations interact with each other.

What’s all this got to do with advertising? Plenty, actually.

You may be surprised to hear that the IPA offers clients and agencies the services of a relationship counsellor, and just last month published a psychological framework, conceived by Professor Julie Hay, which sets out groundrules that clients and agencies could use to govern their working relationships.

It’s that R word again.

I’ve written before about IPA President Ian Priest’s mission to improve client-agency relationships. Better relationships, he believes, are longer ones, and longer ones produce better, more effective work. There’s plenty of evidence to back this up: Audi/BBH; BMW/WCRS; Sainsbury’s/AMV; John Lewis/Adam&Eve.

But how do you get there? It’s not easy when a marketing director’s life span is shorter than that of a Spurs manager, and the average tenure of an agency on a piece of business is less than three years.

If you want an extreme example of this, consider the case of B&Q and Karmarama. In November 2012 it wins the £40 million B&Q business. In October 2013 B&Q appoints a new marketing director, Chris Moss, best known for launching Orange and 118 118 with WCRS.

In December 2013, Karmarama, seeing the writing on the wall, resigns. And guess what? A month later, WCRS picks up the B&Q business without a pitch.

The answer is that it’s all about relationships – building them, nurturing them, caring for them. In this case Moss’s relationship with WCRS, tried and tested in the fire of two textbook brand launches, was always going to out-trump anything Karmarama had with B&Q.

But the relationship between Moss and WCRS is the exception, not the rule. As the longevity of the Moss-WCRS axis demonstrates, it takes time to build relationships, not only between individuals, but also between organisations.

But time is exactly what neither client nor agency has when the appointment is first made. Both sides are under pressure to generate change – that’s why the client has fired its old agency and appointed a new one – and that pressure shows.

So how do you get the relationship off to the best possible start? And how do you buy yourself time to get it right? Without the advantage of a shared history of the kind that Moss and WCRS, have you have to build from scratch.

Which is where the IPA’s psychological framework comes in. We’ve all suffered from professional relationships that go wrong – one side gives feedback that the other perceives as cruel, disrespectful and contains a hidden agenda, but the initiator believes is direct and honest.

That sort of thing happens because we often communicate in a way that is outside our conscious awareness. Just understanding dynamics like this can be the key to getting them right.

It is exactly these issues the IPA’s psychological framework tackles, and the idea is that members of both client and agency teams sign up to it.

It’s a simple 10-point charter containing gems like this: “Where we disagree with someone’s decision we will assume good intentions and seek to understand how they made that decision before we advise them of our objections.”

It’s not rocket science, but then neither is the art of managing relationships. It’s more that, in the heat of the moment, the basics are passed over. And while the psychological framework or contract has no legal force, the fact that both sides have signed up gives it a moral core.

New relationships are also most likely to founder in the early days. We all know that from our personal experience – those who wash up as they go along (highly anal, in my opinion) versus those who leave all the crockery and cutlery dirty until there’s no clean items left – and the same principles apply to professional relationships.

So the second part of the IPA initiative is a 100-day charter, governing how clients and agencies will act in the first instance to establish the foundations. Again, we know how these things go wrong in a professional environment.

Agree a piece of work, and the scope suddenly changes. The agency likes proper briefs, the client likes to keep it fluid. A new stakeholder suddenly appears with a different agenda. All these things can undermine a new client-agency relationship at the very point it needs solidity and mutual understanding.

The 100-day charter, which covers areas such as briefing, sign-offs, responsibilities and feedback mechanisms, is an attempt to manage the transitional period.

Cynics will say that this is all wishful thinking, and it won’t make a blind bit of difference. I disagree. Both initiatives, while appearing under the auspices of the IPA, contain input from clients and agency intermediaries and reflect the sense in which there is, in this area at least, a shared agenda.

Back to another R word: respect. Respect, or mutual respect, underpins this wonderful compact agreed between Avis and DDB, the agency that put it on the map in the 60s with the brilliant “We try harder” campaign, and now the basis of the current Avis-VVCP relationship.

“Avis will never know as much about advertising and brand communication as DDB, and DDB will never know as much about the rent-a-car business as Avis,” goes one item.

Here’s another: “Avis will approve or disapprove, not to try to improve, ads which are submitted.”

Go here to download, for free, the relevant sections.

As I say, it’s all about mutual respect. Amen to that.