PERCEPTION REALITY
It is possible to dismiss the concept of someone’s perception as little more than a half-formed opinion, based on little to no factual information. But, as we’ve seen with recent political events, where feelings regularly seemed to trump facts, perceptions are often much more than that. They are shaped by what we experience in the real world and by what we see and hear in the media and we rationalise that information to form a perception. We shriek at the sight of a tiny spider not because we know it’s venomous, but because we believe it might be.
One of our favourite advertising philosophers Jeremy Bullmore once wrote that “people build brands as birds build nests, from scraps and straws we chance upon”. He updated that later and said that those scraps and straws are actually “laid in our path by the brand’s owner – the packs, the promotions, the price, the advertising – in the cunning hope and expectation that the brand we thereby build will be the one we’ll come to love and favour.”
Agencies also lay their scraps and straws in the path of their potential customers in an effort to create a perception of momentum, often by promoting the work they’ve done, the clients they’ve won, the people they’ve hired or the beliefs they abide by. As another favourite advertising philosopher Faris Yakob wrote recently, ‘everything is PR’. But we wanted to find out what those who pay the bills – the country’s top marketers – thought. How are their needs changing? What do they look for in an agency? What are their frustrations? How do they choose the right partner? Which agencies stand out?
When we approached TRA to help us conduct research into the perceptions marketers have of agencies in New Zealand, our aim was not to produce an objective rundown of how they were performing. The point was really to provide an indication of how some of the most prominent decision makers in the industry perceive agency performance (or, in some cases, non-performance) and offer some information that might help agencies
