By Mark Chataway, Agency Confidential
People are always saying the agency-client relationship is like a marriage, but really what it’s like is an arranged marriage.
Consider: When I lived in New York, I had a close friend who had grown up in an orthodox Sephardic Jewish family. David would often say he was convinced that the arranged marriages of his parents’ generation worked much better than all the dating, breaking up, and agonizing of modern, romantic relationships. Back then, the parents from both sides talked endlessly about possibly compatible couples. When they thought they had found one, they would introduce them. After a few chaperoned sessions of tea drinking, the young people were expected to commit to one another or to reject one another. And if they committed, they had to make it work.
If you think arranged marriages could do with a little more mystery, you’ll love conventional agency pitches where you send out a request for proposals and wait for some agency to come back with that Eureka idea.
* * *
Read the complete article, published in Agency Confidential, at: http://pharmexec.findpharma.com/pharmexec/Articles/Seven-Strategies-For-Successful-Agency-Hook-Ups/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/529146