We’re sometimes challenged by clients looking to hire an agency that specializes in one industry, like consumer package goods, health and wellness, education, pharma, and so on. Ironically, we made a conscious choice not to specialize in any one vertical over a decade ago. The rationale is fairly simple—and in our opinion, there are big wins on both sides of the table.
Live And Learn
While the opportunity to focus a studio’s energy in one direction can provide a singular advantage in terms of experience, the creative and account teams can lose the insights and real-time feedback that come from working on totally different kinds of business, in completely different fields.
Whether tied to high-level learnings about demographics and tendencies, or way more granular findings that come from the intuiting of shopper behavior and specific conversion data, the ability to draw conclusions and to make assumptions across industries is advantageous, and interesting.
Be Inspired
It’s always helpful to see what’s driving innovation across different business categories, from tech sectors, to real estate, wine and spirits, to finance. Having internal insight into the design and marketing choices being made for different kinds of clients often results in marketing adaptations that are atypical for a particular industry, and consequently, more successful.
Mix It Up
This one is for our people, but also benefits our clients. While the nature of boutique agency days can be somewhat frenetic, it’s the diversity of these assignments that inspires a culture of creative variations, and better work.
The ability for our team to break from social media support or content creation, to attack the design for a new e-commerce website or print ad campaign, gives them a chance to get immersed in the entire marketing landscape, across a handful of brands. In addition to mixing it up, this also serves as a constant reminder of how all the various marketing touch points and seemingly disparate dots are connected for the purposes of building brands and driving sales.
So What?
There will always be clients who want to work with agencies that just do one thing, for one sector, and there will always be agencies to fit that need. While we don’t tailor our approach to just one vertical, our Swiss Army-like services have evolved over the course of our 15+ years to support expertise across many industries, and to help build a client roster, and a portfolio that we’re really floats our boat.