Carving out a niche…

Someone once said two clients in the same sector is a conflict of interest,but three is a specialism. Our experience backs that up…

Any agency sets out with the aim to have as broad a client base as possible. This is desirable from both the financial and creative perspective. At Ingenious, we’ve always been proud of the range of clients we have, not only do they offer varied and interesting creative challenges, commercially it helps protect you from downturns or quiet periods in specific industries or sectors. Well, that’s the theory, anyway…

However, almost by accident we have found ourselves with more than one client in a couple of sectors. Has it caused us issues? Well, not really, we have found clients actually quite like agencies that have other clients in their sector. Provided there isn’t a direct conflict, of course. We are blessed with some wonderful clients in the same industry, but there is very little overlap, so we are able to draw on our experience of a genre without the work being ‘samey’.

When presenting new work to clients, we find it’s great to be able to draw on this industry knowledge. Even if it’s not actually a central part of the creative or strategic direction, we find our thinking is influenced and informed by work we’ve done elsewhere. All knowledge is good, provided you know where and when to apply it!

On the other side of the coin, we have also been appointed to work with a new client partly because we didn’t have any experience of their sector, and therefore were unburdened with preconceptions about what the work and the client would entail. Is that the exception that proves the rule?