Wolff Olins invites you to engage in a different kind of conversation.
We live in a world where the solving of business problems through brand has never been harder or more important. The world is moving faster than ever and is becoming ever more unpredictable. Many of the challenges for brands seeking to drive business are extremely new: Social media, continual innovation, the creation of unique experiences, and moving from a controlling mentality to one of influence. Many of the challenges are old but have a new context: fighting commoditization, encouraging trust, creating loyalty, and engaging people in an open source, hyperlinked and transparent world.
But as with any time of change, brands also have tremendous opportunities to find new ways to innovate in order to drive new revenues and new growth.
Unfortunately, against this background of both challenge and opportunity the dialogue between potential clients and potential agencies is becoming ever more broken. Agencies are fishing for clients. Clients are fishing for ideas. Both are dancing around each other. Neither is satisfied.
So rather than fight this, why not embrace it and innovate against it? In essence, we could be fishing together co-operatively rather than against each other competitively.
That’s why we’re creating “Come Fishing”, a new forum where potential clients, ourselves and maybe even some other agencies can come together and just have a chat. No strings, no decks, no new business pitch. Just good ideas.
We think a conversation that we can have in groups or one on one, in person or online is a much more satisfying way to engage. And we sincerely hope that all of you out there who’ve got tricky business/brand challenges (and opportunities) will agree.
In a true spirit of partnership, and because we’re not quite ready, we haven’t defined exactly what it will be yet. So if you represent a brand and you’re interested in joining in, please use the comments section so that we can find out the kind of conversation you’d like to have. Alternatively, if you’re going to be in or around New York City, then please come in and spend some time with us co-creating how this forum will work and what it will be like. We’re going be hosting brainstorming sessions about it over the next few weeks.
We think this will be fun, and a great way to start a different kind of dialogue, so we look forwards to fishing together with you soon.
Stay tuned for more posts as we introduce new ideas and flesh things out further.
(Paul Worthington)
