The industry for marketing and communication services is currently undergoing a fundamental transformation: Concentration tendencies, fragmented communication, the market entry of internationally operating strategy consultancies into the agency business, new agency models such as virtual agencies or brand agencies or the emergence of specialised agencies characterise the upheaval.
Far-reaching structural changes are always accompanied by a strong sense of uncertainty. There is rarely a lack of concepts, guiding principles or orientations. Rather, the problem lies in a multitude of often contradictory concepts that guide action.
The agency industry has changed its concepts with extraordinary speed. And often leaves the agency client baffled with an increased coordination effort in the selection and orchestration of agency services.
However, we would like to explain in more detail why it makes sense to work with an agency specialising in family marketing.
There is no such thing as "the" family
There are around 11.6 million families in Germany. Father, mother, children. But also grandma, grandpa, aunt and uncle, and the smaller the nuclear family, the more often neighbours, work colleagues or pets are also part of the family circle. Families are also, of course, single parents or same-sex couples with children. The concept of family therefore no longer includes only the nuclear family, but has become qualitatively more complex and differentiated and quantitatively large and of considerable economic importance.
There is hardly an industry that does not formulate family friendliness as a business goal, hardly a company that would or could do without families as consumers. Whether car brands, tour operators, media companies - they all recognise families as an economically strong market segment.
However, meeting the heterogeneous needs of individual and multiple family members is not an easy task for producers and retailers. The expectations, needs and structures of families are too heterogeneous to successfully communicate with them as a homogeneous target group quasi en passant.
The economic relevance of the family target group alone, its heterogeneity and internal differentiation justify working with a specialist agency for family marketing.
Pragmatic core of marketing - needs-oriented design of customer relationships
The necessary return to the pragmatic core of marketing, namely the successful shaping of customer relationships based on their needs, presupposes the exact knowledge of these very needs and the possibility of satisfying them. And this can only be done successfully if the agency commissioned has precise knowledge of the target group.
Which buyer personas should be supplied with which content? Which media are relevant when, which influencers have the greatest credibility and what does the customer journey of children, teens, fathers, mothers etc. look like? Which touchpoints offer opportunities for interaction with the brand are the questions to be answered.
A specialist agency for family marketing offers strategic brand management as well as campaigning content tailored to the target group from a single source.
The benefits for the client are obvious: they reduce their coordination effort by hiring one agency instead of many and get a high level of strategic and creative engagement with the target group, greater 1:1 precision in communication and a brand experience tailored to the family.
Specialised agencies for family marketing have specialised tools
Agency clients rightly demand reach and more efficient 1:1 client communication. What initially sounds like squaring the circle turns out to be feasible in view of qualitatively better data analyses. In a networked world, 1:1 communication is the key to conversion and building long-term customer relationships. But the crucial questions are: which data is collected, with which tools and how are the results to be interpreted?
Anamnesis is considered the key to diagnosing diseases. However, no one would think of consulting an internist for an earache, for example, or vice versa. The ENT doctor knows what information he needs for diagnosis and which instruments he must use in a targeted manner. Ultimately, only he as a specialist knows how to interpret the results.
Why do we behave differently in marketing communication? You have to know which data are generated with which tools. KB&B has developed and established FACT, an online survey tool specifically for market research purposes, which is used for quantitative and qualitative surveys of children and their parents.
If it is true that proximity to the consumer, personalised 1:1 communication and individualised marketing are the key to conversion and sales success, then it is equally true that detailed data analysis and interpretation must be target group specific.
Specialised agencies for family marketing offer data collection with suitable tools, conclusive interpretation of the data and meaningful derivation of strategic and operational options for action.
Competitive advantages go to those who are able to reduce complexity
For communication and marketing managers, the world is extremely complex: they have to decide which agency takes on which communication task and which agency goes into the lead.
Godo Röben, Managing Director of Rügenwalder Mühle, once put it quite vividly as follows: "Agencies have to revise their models. It can't be that a marketing manager has to get seven agencies together to sell sausage!" It cannot be - one would add - that an agency client has to hire seven agencies to work on the family target group. Communication is too precious to waste energy on coordinating it.
What is needed, therefore, are agency models that can develop digital, strategic and operative product and brand communication with the same strength and professional expertise for specific target groups.
With a clear message and demonstrable success. Agency models that are scalable according to client needs and can draw on a tried and tested network of specialist expertise.
Media agencies that know which media are used by children at what age, social media agencies that know which influencers are particularly credible, PR agencies that know which tonality resonates with families.
The agency client thus reduces the complexity of its customer approach and focuses on its core competence.
A fist has more power than five individual fingers and a laser beam is more focused than a dozen individual candles.
Special agencies for family marketing offer special access to the target group
A holistic brand experience for families also includes linking all relevant touchpoints in a customer-centric way. In family marketing, this also brings the topic of "education" into focus.
KB&B offers, for example, quality and curriculum-oriented special access to schools and kindergartens through the development and design of school materials and activities. Or the Kinderzeit newsletter, which is an online information portal aimed directly at 30,000 educators.
All actions in the field of educational communication are accompanied by pedagogical advisory boards of teachers and educators. Special access to the target group also enables a coherent brand positioning in the educational context and a complete integration of the brand experience along the entire customer journey.
