Why Aren’t you Seeking an Outside Perspective?

Companies keep getting stuck in the trees without seeing the forest

Companies should be looking for outside perspectives when rebranding and repositioning their marketing. Why?

Because there is a lot that outside perspectives and agencies can see that a company cannot. Once you’re on the inside and invested in the outcome, you can lose sight of the bigger picture and the smaller details that will make a big impact.

It’s not just in rebranding that companies should be looking externally; it’s always a benefit to have and seek out outside stimulation. That stimulation can be just a random idea, even from a formerly engaged third party or from new and fresh talent who just entered the building. The way to stay fresh and relevant within the marketplace is to keep your air attuned to that marketplace. When you don’t have outside perspectives to help you do that, you can lose touch and a number of things happen from there.

First, you lost sight of, as the saying goes, the forest and the trees. The temptation internally is to become increasingly focused on the trees. The path quickly goes from the issue at a macro level to the issue at a micro level to the issue at a super micro level. The more you dig and become ingrained in the third decimal place, the more you miss the trends that are currently happening and will happen. You miss the forest. A third party can help prevent that.

The second, and potentially worse, is that your business will develop an illness from which it is difficult to recover. It’s called groupthink.

As a team, you start to circle the same issues in the same processes with the same ways of thinking. Lo and behold, you come up with the exact same solutions. If the market was static and your competitors were doing the same, that could hypothetically be a satisfactory approach. The problem is that they aren’t — they’re getting ahead. And I guarantee in part that outside perspectives are helping.

One of the most helpful reasons to get an outside perspective or outside agency is that they help you measure your talent.

As you build and manage a team, your team evolves. What are you benchmarking that team against? Outside agencies and perspectives allow fresh people with fresh ideas can act as a way for your to measure your talent and make sure your team is as vibrant, up to date and sharp as you expect them to be.

These people, who may not be as intimately familiar with your business or your industry, are usually the ones that can find what we call, at my company, the Blinding Glimpses of the Obvious — the BGOs. We believe so strongly in that that we call ourselves Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious.

Outsiders help you find your “a-ha” moments, where the observation and strategy becomes so clear, you wonder how you missed it before.

As a third party agency, I’m obviously a huge advocate of them. Yet it can be hard for any company to know how much to engage with them.

Don’t over use them. Don’t under use them. Don’t become too dependent on them. Don’t be too independent from them. Don’t be dismissive of their talent. Don’t only rely on their insights.

Finding the balance between all of those is tricky. It all comes down to making sure you’ve found the right one — which I will give some advice on doing in my next article.

Aaron Webber is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Webber Investments LLC, as well as a Managing Partner at Madison Wall Agencies.

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