B2B Relationships in the Advertisement Business : A Study of Advertising Agency-Client Relationships

Abstract In the complex business environments of today, firms are in need of external expertise in order to achieve a competitive edge. The increased complexity is partly due to technological devel-opment and facilitated global access affecting most markets. Therefore, marketing activities has increased importance in a firm’s core strategy. Being able to communicate to customers in a creative and more direct way is vital in order to survive in a global battlefield. One interesting question is how one should involve external expertise in achieving successful marketing in an effective manner. There seem to be difficulties in maintaining long-term agency-client relation-ships and one could question why? Quite often one finds clear differences reflecting role defi-nition and what the parties expect of each other. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the relationship between advertising agencies and their clients. The authors aim to investigate how companies use external influence/advertising agencies in their marketing communication process and identify the crucial factors leading to suc-cess/failure of agency-client relationships. A pre-study was made in order to get an understanding about the actual situation on the field, and gave us the interest in investigate the agency-client relationship. Then, a qualitative multiple case studies have been made and gave a relatively good insight in the agency-client relationship. Insight in where the relationships are lacking and where improvement is needed. The authors discovered that why agencies and clients fail in their relationships, many times is a result of miscommunication and misunderstandings. Attitudes towards each others field of op-erating and lack of dialogue seem to be the reasons why this appears. They need to meet at a level somewhere in between the points at the present, hence need for agencies to have a deeper understanding than present client desire and for agencies to be able to adjust to client needs, and correlating their abilities. The key is communication. A lot of the improvements is up to agencies in mediating and marketing themselves in a more efficient manner than today. Advertising agencies are often failing in establishing an effective communication process with their clients