Getting the best from clients

Marketing literature tends to pontificate on themes like customer intimacy. Mr Parameswaran chooses the story-telling approach to exhume narratives involving the likes of Hemu Ramiah and Azim Premji

Sponge 

Leadership Lessons I Learnt From My Client

Ambi Parameswaran

Westland

184 pages; Rs 350

Ambi Parameswaran’s new offering, Sponge, is a delightful treatise on life, relationships and human values and judgements. The perspective of the book, its incidents and their contexts, all just happen to be from the platform the author knows best — advertising and marketing.
 

A seasoned professional, Ambi Parameswaran has walked every gully in Mumbai, the Mecca of branding and advertising, and has worked with almost every client worth knowing. With a touch of acceptable exaggeration and borrowing from the eponymous Benjamin Jowett limerick, I would say that those clients whom Mr Parameswaran does not know are probably not worth knowing.

The book contains 25 anecdotes and stories about his moments of truth with his clients. The incidents are common-place, they are the kind that occur every day in every person’s career. Each incident is narrated with an implicit format of the four Es. What was the Episode? What was the Emotion around it? What do Educational experts in management say about such themes? Explore the learnings from the episode. It appears that the author did not design this format, it just evolved as he thought about the book, right from the early stages.

Client leaders like Kal Sundaram of Glaxo, Anand Kripalu of Cadbury, Krishan Lal Chugh and Jagdish Narain Sapru of ITC and Verghese Kurien of Amul, all helped their executives focus on the marketing problem that was required to be solved, the customer insights and the solution rather than nitpicking about details such as font size, colours, look of the model and so on. Brand managers do tend to get embroiled with these sorts of peripheral matters at the expense of the main issue. These leaders really believed that a professional agency is hired and paid to study these matters, do their homework thoroughly and make professional recommendations.  The role of the client is to listen carefully, ever so carefully, to the agency’s homework and logic. The client should hold the agency accountable in the crucial arenas. Only occasionally is the client better at doing what is the agency’s forte. This is what happened with the technically-oriented body copy for Thermax’s corporate advertising after the company name changed from Wanson to Thermax in 1980. Mr Parameswaran applauds the late Rohinton Aga for doing a better job than the agency could.

Marketing literature tends to pontificate on themes like customer intimacy and corporate frugality. Mr Parameswaran chooses the story-telling approach to exhume narratives involving the likes of Hemu Ramiah, the book-loving owner of a book store, and Azim Premji of Wipro.  
 

Clients sometimes write about how they got the best out of an agency. It is rare to read about how an agency got the best out of a client. This reviewer wonders about where the genius lies — in the episodes themselves or in the eye of the beholder?

The answer is simple: In life, almost always, the lesson and the significance lie in the viewer’s eye and mindset. Several agency senior honchos have written terrific books. These books tend to focus on how the agency gets the big idea, how the agency overcomes objections and sells the idea to a client and, more often than not, ends up with the grand solution and its huge commercial outcome. Sifting through the adipose tissue of the client’s aggregate mindset and its inevitable politics requires a meditative and calm approach. It requires the agency to be focused single-mindedly on consumer issues and their solutions. It requires a clear capability to pick up the signal from the high noise-to-signal ratio in every client organisation. Mr Parameswaran brings out the importance of such capabilities without ever saying so.

Though Sponge is an easy read for learnings from clients, the book could have included some views and advice for the future. First, agency services have been disrupted these days and relations have become increasingly transactional. How can today’s agency executive practice the old world skills that the author advocates? Second, in an increasingly digital environment, how should protégés gain from mentors? The book is certainly inspirational but with his four decades in the field, the author could have made the book more instructional.

All in all, however, Mr Parameswaran’s book exemplifies Vincent van Gogh’s observation, “The little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realising it.” This is a delightful read, entirely possible to complete during a plane ride from Mumbai to Kolkata, leaving the reader with plenty of food for thought long after the journey is over.