Peter Kirkby
I look after global marketing excellence within the Consumer Health Care business of GlaxoSmithKline. Part of my remit is agency relationship management.
One of the reasons we decided to independently audit our agency relationships was to try and save cost which could then be reinvested in the brands.
Also, if we were going to put more money into our A&P, we needed to make sure that the quality of the work and the relationships we have with our agencies was as strong and as robust as possible across twenty markets all over the world. Ultimately it was about trying to make sure that we got the best return on the investment.
We used RAM to audit the relationship for two reasons. Firstly, because we wanted both the agencies and our people to be able to say what they really felt. The second was benchmarking, and we wanted to see how well we stacked up versus other organisations.
There were three other reasons why we used RAM.
Firstly, they came recommended by our partners.
Secondly, the system was very easy and intuitive to use, and very easy to roll out.
Thirdly, was the quality of the analysis and insights. We were able to use at; brand level, country level and at the global level to really leverage the quality of our business relationships.
RAM's analysis enabled us to put much greater focus on the development process. It highlighted areas where we could significantly improve our performance, and what we're doing now is tracking our performance against those areas on a quarterly basis to make sure, that come the next audit, we're seeing a significant improvement in those ways of working.
What surprised me was how an objective survey can help facilitate the kind of conversations people naturally seem to find quite difficult.
The benefits to our business are better, more effective work, more efficiently delivered.