Take a Stand for Your Brand

Building a Great Agency Brand from the Inside Out

Take a Stand for Your Brand: Building a Great Agency from the Inside Out shows how marketing firms can do for themselves what they do for their clients—build a great brand.

It’s ironic that advertising agencies preach differentiation but behave like commodities. They are usually so eager to be a “full–service integrated agency” that they try to stand for everything. They forget that standing for everything is just another way of standing for nothing. Just like any other successful product or service, agencies need a meaningful and distinctive position in the marketplace.

Positioning your firm means moving from the middle and taking a side. It means realizing that you can’t “boil the ocean.” If you don’t claim a position, you will be positioned simply by your location—which is really no position at all. And if you don’t have a branding strategy, you’ll become part of someone else’s.

Take a Stand for Your Brand explores not only why agencies need to do a better job of branding themselves, but how, including:

• Focusing your firm to attract more of the clients and people you really want.
• The perils of a business model that’s a mile wide but only a few inches deep.
• Discovering what has made your agency successful up to this point.
• Defining what business you’re really in.
• How agencies have become famous by doing what they do best.
• Giving prospects outside your marketplace a compelling reason to do business with you.
• Aligning your agency brand throughout all departments and disciplines of your organization.
• Why an effective agency positioning means appealing to some clients, but not all clients.
• Telling your agency story in a sentence, a paragraph, and a page.
• How a strong focus can help you playing in a new business game you’re favored to win.

Defining what makes your organization different, then making it different, is the best leadership you could possibly provide your agency. Take a Stand for Your Brand shows how.

Available at www.adbuzz.com or www.amazon.com.

The shoemaker story about holes in their shoes applies to ad agencies as well. ‘Take a Stand for Your Brand’ inspires the people who market for a living to market themselves.Jonathan Bond, Kirshenbaum & Bond

This is a handbook for any agency that wants to set itself apart from the pack. Tim Williams has distilled much of the best thinking ever done about brands and applied it single–mindedly to the agency business model. It ought to be mandatory reading for serious students of the business.Robert F. Lauterborn, Professor of Advertising |University of North Carolina

Tim Williams has the best grasp on agency brand positioning I have ever seen. It deserves as wide an audience as possible within our industry.Cindy Gallop, Former Chairman | Bartle Bogle Hegarty

About the Author. Tim Williams is a recognized thought leader in the creative services industry. As founder of Ignition Consulting Group, Tim is a regular presenter for major advertising industry associations. He has authored numerous articles in leading business and trade magazines, and consults with marketing communications firms throughout North America.