As Greensquare celebrated 20 years in business,
Creative Director and Founder Phil Westwood sat down in
conversation with Richard Heathcote to reflect on
the last two decades catalogue of work and what
lies in store for the next 20 years and beyond.
This is an extract from their discussion; to listen to
the full interview launch the player below.
Listen to this interview in full:
RH: Greensquare are celebrating 20 years in business
this year. What are some of the biggest challenges
you’ve come across for automotive brands, and have
the types of challenges been pretty consistent over
the last 20 years, or do new challenges present
themselves all the time?
PW: I would say that historically, automotive brands
have always faced the same challenges. Put someone
in the vehicle and keep them there. They want to
come back for another one.
At Greensquare we’ve built what we call The Square
Route, which is a customer journey that we’ve
mapped out for vehicles. There are three attributes
to it: The first is what we call building desire,
followed by building relationships and then
building loyalty. For example, if we look at
building desire, what we’re looking to achieve
here is changing a want into a need.
RH: Vehicle brands advertising campaigns can
arguably often appear very similar in style. So, cars
sweeping across luxurious city and countryside
scapes, sometimes with ambiguous titles and
voiceover, which can make them sound a bit like
perfume or aftershave adverts. So, do many of them
stand out to you, and if not, how can they stand out
and be different? And likewise, how do you make
things stand out and be different for your clients?
PW: Well, the first answer I have to give you is no,
they don’t stand out. I think that you really are now
looking at things where we are process-driven in
a lot of ways, people aren’t actually thinking too
much about the person.
I think that this is a big problem for me, actually,
when I look at our industry. All we’re interested
in is getting something out there as quickly as
we can, then just sitting behind a set of metrics,
we’ve missed the whole point. When you look at
advertising in the UK now, I’m pretty horrified
to know that 89% of it is not remembered at all.
We’ve lost the art of selling. Nobody is interested
in that.
RH: It’s all become very abstract in a way, hasn’t it?
Every advert could be anything, could be artificially
generated.
PW: Absolutely. You’ve mentioned they could be
an advert for a perfume, and this is the problem
we have. What would I do differently? I’d actually
ask the question, “Why should I buy this car? What
is it about this car that’s better than those?” And
answering your question in terms of what we do
with the larger vehicles, we’ve gone to automotive
in terms of how you would perhaps market a
premium brand and brought those values in to a
commercial vehicle.
I take the view that if you’re asking somebody to
spend probably in some respects double what you’d
ask them to spend on the Bentley, you treat them in
the same vein. You don’t insult them by just giving
them some half-arsed marketing. Do it properly.
RH: And there’s been quite a sea change over the
last few years in the general public’s attitude
towards cars, the move from petrol and diesel to
electric. Mindsets are changing of how and when
we use vehicles, and petrol prices, of course, which
have been horrendous lately. How do you think that
informs the advertising for car manufacturers,
and has there been any noticeable change in our
campaigns are created?
PW: We don’t know what that future fuel or the
future technology is going to be, because that is
changing on a daily basis. But yes, in terms of, say,
an electric vehicle, people are interested obviously
in terms of how long that will run before they have
to charge it again.
In terms of a commercial vehicle, you are then
obviously looking at what else it’s going to do,
because unlike a car, there are potentially other
things are happening with this vehicle. So, it
might be pulling something, it might actually have
mechanisms running from it, and all of a sudden
that’s draining energy away. So, there are challenges
in terms of that and how you communicate them.
It’s not a market that’s been so static for years that
change isn’t ever happening or is welcome. Things
move all the time within automotive, they’re going
to move, I think, quite seismically, actually, over the
next 10 years.
RH: So how have you developed Greensquare’s USP
over the last 20 years? Are your original value still
as relevant today, and where do you see the next 20
years? Any distinct changes envisioned?
PW: I think if we look at the values, they’re pretty
much where they were when we started. I’m very
happy with where we are now as an agency. I think
we’re in the best position we’ve ever been in. I hope
we carry on the path we’re on now, because I believe
it’s the right one.
RH: Knowing you’re in the best possible place where
you are right now, that’s the main thing for now
anyway.
PW: I think that you have to be comfortable with
where you’re at, you have to be confident and I’m
very confident in the offering that we have to the
market. I recently attended an industry-led debate
online, and somebody made reference to the fact
that the average client-agency relationship spans
three years. I looked at what we were doing and
bearing in mind that we’d just taken on two new
clients probably about two or three months before,
we were at just under nine. So, we are three times
the average, I took a lot from that.
RH: Well, which leads me to what prompted your
specialism in the automotive industry in the first
place, and do you see the next 20 years continuing
to specialize in that same area? Or is there any
natural branching out to associated industries?
PW: Going back to 2017, I’d been running the
agency for 14 years. I knew there was something
that I wanted to do, but I didn’t know what. I had
to take myself out of the business and ask a series
of questions to be able to move forwards. The more
that I looked at this, the more that I realised that
what I didn’t want anymore was to be like the
majority of agencies in this country, which are what
you would call generalists.
I arrived at a decision where we either specialised
in a discipline, so just one thing, are we just going
to be a digital agency? Are we just going to make
films? Or do we specialise in a sector, but retain
all of the skillsets that we’ve built up over those
previous years? It was an easy decision to make.
You never know where you’re going to go in life
and in business, because things can change, and
opportunities arise and present themselves. But
I think certainly sitting here today, I’d be very
surprised if in 5, 10 years, who knows, that we’re not
working with vehicles, because I think that we’ve
built something quite special.
RH: Has changing technology, the rise in alternative
fuels and technology and artificial intelligence,
impacted the sorts of brands that
you work with?
PW: It hasn’t impacted on us in terms of who
we would work with. I think it would be
interesting if somebody came to me and said,
“We’ve developed this technology. Are you
interested?” I’d like to have that conversation.
Let’s not forget that when you are working within
several sectors across a number of vehicles, you
have to understand them.
RH: I suppose whether it’s a Model T Ford or a Tesla
Model X, it’s still a box that transports people or
things from A to B.
PW: Yes. Also, believe it or not, it could be a refuse
wagon, it could be an agricultural sprayer, it could
be a tractor, they could be pulling a trailer, it could
be a crane, it could be anything. You’d be amazed
how enthusiastic people get over a piece of kit. And
I love that, I love to see it. That’s why we do what we
do in terms of the values that we bring in from what
you might historically expect to see from premium
car brands, because you are working with people
that love machines, so treat it with love.
RH: And have marketing techniques changed over
the years with all the modern communications
channels that are now available, with many brands
turning to things like TikTok, as opposed to
traditional TV and magazine advertising?
PW: It depends what you’re selling and where the
audience is, because if the audience isn’t on TikTok,
don’t bother going onto TikTok. We have to move
with whatever technology is available.
When you look at things now, we’re in such
a better place. Historically, you’d place an
advert in a magazine, say a prayer and hope
that you got some leads from it. If you didn’t ask
the person or if you hadn’t got a reference number
and even if you’ve got a reference number, they may
not remember it. So, you didn’t really know if your
ad had worked.
You now know, because you can see where people
are going, what they’re doing, what they like,
and that’s fantastic. But I keep coming back to the
same point. Unless you understand who you’re
going out to, what they want and what you want,
you’re wasting your time.
And by the way, if you really want to stand out
these days, print something.
RH: You have introduced an Accelerator Programme.
Why have you done this?
PW: There are lots of companies out there within
engineering, wheel-based engineering in particular,
that either don’t have anybody in marketing,
or it’s somebody’s job, but it’s not their main job.
We devised the Accelerator Programme to talk to
businesses in this position.
It starts with a question, “Where do you want to
go?” In some respects, we end up writing a business
plan that doesn’t exist, and you start from there.
Once we understand what the goals are, we write
a marketing plan for that business for either
12 months, sometimes a little bit longer,
but generally 12 months, because I think that’s
a good chunk of time to work to. You don’t
want to go too far, because as we’ve already
established, things can change quite quickly.
And then you have a series of monthly activities
that answer those questions asked within the
strategy. We have regular review meetings with
the client, they receive monthly reports that
are generated, showing them what we’ve done,
they get the analytics from campaigns that we’ve
been running.
It’s a real team effort. We don’t just know the people
in the boardroom and in the sales team. We know
the people on the shop floor, the people who are out
on the road, the service engineers, because I think
that that’s the only way to do it.
I think this is something that sets Greensquare
apart, we have embraced the fact that we’re in
a results-driven business. Hence, whatever we
are doing is always relevant to that client and
their marketplace.
RH: And do you get a free reign a lot of the
time with these sorts of clients with the
Accelerator Programme, or do you usually
have to stay between very strict parameters,
or do you just basically walk in and say, “Well,
this is what you need to do, and you either
do it or you don’t?”
PW: A fairly free reign, because it’s our area of
expertise and that’s why we are there. It starts with
an audit, we look at what they’re doing, what they’ve
done and from there it’s generally easy to see what
needs to happen.
We are there to take people out of their comfort
zones. I think the point here is that you can’t stay
in that little bubble, because if it hasn’t worked,
you’ve got to go elsewhere. We have to be respectful
at all times, we are there to do a job, you have to
be able to put your point across, but we have to be
respectful, because at times we’re asking people to
do something that is so alien to them. They might
not totally get it, but they have enough trust in
you. I think for me, that’s probably one of the most
satisfying parts of this job.
RH: In your eyes, how will Greensquare continue to
innovate and stay ahead of the curve in marketing
and branding over the next 20 years?
PW: As an agency we are always looking to do
things better, I think that you have to keep pushing,
keep moving forwards. So, when you say innovate,
it’s all about ideas generation. There’s always
something that you can improve on, because nobody
gets to the point where everything’s absolutely
perfect. You have to adapt to an ever-changing
landscape; we’re certainly going to remain open
to new techniques and also carry on using trusted
techniques. Marketing and branding has always been
about people. We are people-focused, and our focus
will remain on people.