I recently found myself in Paris seated on a low-slung lime-green couch, in a light-flooded lime-green conference room overlooking a vast workspace filled with stylish creative professionals. An elegant sign just outside the conference room announced the hour we would be together to discuss market intelligence, customer choices and the changing nature of advertising. Bottles of Evian (a BETC RSCG client) were neatly displayed on the table. A leaning white trash can streaked faintly with Coca Cola proved this space was used by the creative associates at EuroRSCG – not just clients.

I was waiting to interview Jerome Guilbert, the chief strategist of BETC Euro RSCG. During Guilbert’s tenure, BETC RSCG has grown to be the largest advertising agency in France, and is part of the worldwide powerhouse Havas, one of the biggest providers of advertising, marketing and public relations. BETC RSCG also leads France in CRM. He has created award-winning campaigns against tobacco and renowned creative positioning for Air France, Thales, Chanel and Louis Vuitton.

Guilbert arrives, sliding the door shut behind him. Together we adjust the blinds to close out some of the warm April sunlight. Called by a colleague “one of the smartest, most original strategic business thinkers I have met,” and “challenging and brilliant,” Guilbert has a collegial presence gives one few clues about his actual influence in the market.

You instantly spot power in Guilbert’s unshaven face, casual clothes, calm spirit and superb listening skills. His intelligent eyes crowd his aquiline nose, intensifying his look of concentration. His smile is warm and his thoughts are coherent, honest, and rooted in a clear picture of the business problems faced by corporations – and by the ad agencies serving them.

Guilbert was part of the team that designed new trashcans for the Paris Métro – hardly an expected task for a traditional ad agency, but a signature, outside-the-box deliverable for BETC RSCG. The Paris subway, they had discovered, was not just a way of getting back and forth to work anymore. BETC RSCG studied Paris commuters and discovered that “most commuters were breaking away from their daily routine of ‘boulot, metro, dodo’ (work, train, bed),” according to The Economic Times. Taking the subway was – or could be – a critical element of the great Parisian life style. Métro was a brand experience waiting to be exploited.

I had come to Paris in part to meet Guilbert. We had a few clients in common, but most importantly he was a fellow strategic thinker about how customers make choices. For this article, I wanted to ask bigger questions, though. I wanted to focus on the challenges he faced in getting his clients to take the bigger picture about customers: What data do you use to understand customers, how do you analyze, report and act on that data, and how do you work with them to create a customer-centric culture?

IBM recently reported that the culture issue is a huge challenge in creating successful CRM initiatives. One of the biggest challenges in creating a more customer centric organization – and therefore in choosing and rolling out the right CRM solution – is developing a customer strategy that gives you a sustainable competitive advantage. Companies like mine who develop such strategies must keep clients constantly focused on boosting the value they create for customers.

But measuring the value you create for your customers inevitably relies on measuring perceptions – and in the world of perceptions, traditionally it has been the advertising agency running the show. And for many years, ad agencies delivered for major corporations with demand-driving campaigns that have become a part of our culture, language and iconography: Kleenex, Band-Aid, Viagra, the Michelin man, Nike’s swoosh.

But the case of Nike provides interesting examples of how the new economy creates new opportunities and crises. Nike hired manufacturing and assembly plants employing underaged girls who worked long hours putting together high-end shoes – the scandal was the first of many in the apparel industry that destroyed shareholder value and tarnished careers. And while any ad agency would agree that Nike’s brand equity has rebounded through disciplined application of advertisements and public relations, the critical insight is that its brand equity was damaged in record time because of the Internet. People talked. Stock prices dropped. The buzz created a buzz saw that the behemoth Nike strode right into.

The progressive advertising agency in the new economy must help clients monitor and manage buzz, as well as any other channel where a prospect’s or customer’s perceptions are shaped. The new economy is forcing on the ad trade a transformational change: it must educate clients about the risks and opportunities posed by buzz and how buzz fits into more traditional promotional channels, including customer touch points such as the Web, e-mail and call centers. Just as importantly, progressive ad agencies have to deal quantitatively and comprehensively with new kinds of data about customer perceptions and behaviors, share this data and analytics with clients, and help them shape their operations when they can.

In short, just taking a look at top-performing ad agencies can give us a clue to how customer intelligence, channel management and corporate culture is evolving.

Next time, we reveal Guilbert’s views.

Company: pkward.com