Creativity
£38000 is the average annual cost to pitch if you are a UK design agency
We’ve just co-authored some ground-breaking research in partnership with British Design Innovation (www.britishdesign.co.uk). We approached them a few months ago with a view to gaining a better understanding of the design agency pitching environment. Why it happens and what current attitudes to it are from both an agency and client’s perspective. It makes for very interesting reading and it’s causing quite a stir in the industry!
We’ve just released the results and they constitute two research reports with analysis and commentary.
Firedog Design and research partners, British Design Innovation (BDI), are proud to announce the results of our “Agency Appointment & Pitch versus Productivity” research study, completed on the 5th November 2005
Research conducted with over 200 UK based design agencies confirms that free pitching is still rife amongst clients and agencies and is costing the UK design sector £100,000’s in non-recoverable costs and an average of 12% loss of man hours per annum.
Whilst this comes as no big surprise – one figure to emerge from these research results and backed up by research into the client view on the same subject, is that over 25% of projects/tenders pitched for are not awarded after the pitch process.
The key reasons given by clients were change of marketing strategy, reduced budgets, change of mind and no chemistry established with agencies.
63% of agencies claim to have experienced this decision.
Both research reports with detailed responses
and commentary can be found at www.britishdesigninnovation.org (click on the links within the home page box entitled “Pitch & Productivity”). It is highly unlikely that free pitching will cease. However, whimsical, unethical or lazy procurement procedures by both public and private sector commissioning bodies can be and must be resolved. Both reports highlighted room for improvement on both client and agency side.
We’ve received massive interest from the UK and global industry.
Read about it in the press here:
Icograda
Brand Republic
So what’s your yarn?