creative advertiser the headline for an award-winning advertising
campaign that dramatically increased the sales of Rolls-Royce cars.
Since then, interior quietness has been a hallmark of a great deal of
automotive advertising.
Talk to Your Clients’ Customers
Some of the best ideas for clients will be discovered by talking to
their customers. These discussions can yield invaluable insights
into service requirements, new product opportunities, and
competitive trends. I’ve seen firms do this in the proposal stage,
subsequently embedding valuable perspectives about the client’s
strengths and weaknesses in the final sales proposal, as well as dur-
ing the ongoing relationship. Some former colleagues of mine
wrote an excellent article on this subject, “Spend a Day in the Life
of Your Customer.”^2 It’s the concept of the “home visit” applied, so
to speak, farther down the food chain.
Form Innovation Partnerships
During my research on long-term client relationships, I have occa-
sionally observed “innovation partnerships,” in which a supplier and
a customer formally contract for a continuing set of new ideas. Mike
Mulica, senior vice president of sales and customer operations for
Openwave Systems, the leading supplier of mobile Internet software
for cell phones, describes how powerful these partnerships can be:
Early on in the development of this market, a number of other large
players were entering with competing products. There was a limita-
tion on the number of companies that could really create and man-
ufacture software for the wireless Internet environment, however,
and we decided to use this fact to develop some partnerships that
would create advantages for both sides. I sat down with the VP of
marketing at BT [formerly British Telecom], and we mapped out a
partnering arrangement that went way beyond the typical product224 LEADINGORGANIZATIONALLEARNING