Top 5 client misconceptions

Posted by Jaan on September 4th, 2008 | Add your comment

If you work in the interactive agency world, you’ll no doubt heard these a few times.

• “My industry/company is different from all others, what works for everyone else won’t work for us. Ever.”
• “Our users aren’t web/tech savvy enough to understand or use that.”
• “People want our info, promoting it would be a waste of money. If we put the site up, they will come. “
• “We don’t need user testing.”
• “Everything on the site is equally important.”

Bonus misconception:

• “Our national campaign will work just as well in Argentina, Japan and the USA. It’s all one market to us.”

While it is easy and understandable that we sometimes ask ourselves why we should bother with this at all, we should never forget that our #1 duty is to educate our clients.

Guide them, show them the way. When they are off base say so. Stand up for what’s right, illustrate it, and show examples. Do it all over again for the fifth time if you need to.

And the flip side of that is to be open to learning from clients. Agency people get it wrong much to often, and usually the client is at least right about the needs of their audience.

Inhale, exhale. Calm. Never give up on a client. Not even when they express yet another ‘crazy’ misconception.