One of the major pitfalls with having an in-house creative team doing your marketing activities is the apparent lack of outside-in perspective. Having your team within reach may have some notable advantages, but they also get too compliant sometimes; they may have a hard time challenging briefs from colleagues. Your in-house team understands your brand deeply, which is a great advantage in order to act quickly. Your own team can turn a campaign around in just a few hours if you need it. They hardly need to be briefed. They understand your product, people, and customers. They have an intimate understanding of your business and its industry. And this enables them to create tailor-made campaigns for your company.

Nevertheless, they are only working on one brand—yours. This limits the breadth and depth of their skills. Your in-house team may struggle to extricate themselves from the brand that employs them and see things in a new way. And that sometimes makes them miss out on industry trends since their exposure is limited, creating a lack of perspective that may affect the creative outcome.

On the other hand, using an external agency gives you precisely that—external. By being “external”, these agencies have the distance needed to understand your brand and its problems in a different way. And this may make for better judgment. They can do research, interview your employees, and survey your customers, but they will probably never really understand your business the way your team does. Their industry knowledge will always be second-hand.

When it comes to challenging things and seeing things in a new light, you will need to bring in a fresh pair of eyes from time to time. Let us give you an example:

Not that long ago, we were helping an in-house setup create a new campaign. The branding and insights team did a great job gathering information and background on the various aspects of the audience and defined two major target groups for the campaign. They worked on this for quite some time and everyone was looking forward to the result. People responded well to the presentation and started using the insights within their daily work.

The study and brand work divided the audience into two very distinctive groups with very different values, beliefs, and behaviors. Therefore, it was apparent that we needed to target them very differently and with different messages. To better work with these two audiences, the brand team had given the target groups two distinct names. As previously mentioned, this work was highly appreciated—the various teams in the company really took it in. The only problem was that since everybody in the company knew the origin of the audiences, they started referring to them as a natural thing when they talked to each other. And in external communication. And there was the problem. The marketing team forgot that this was just an internal thing—that the names of the audiences only made sense to people that were introduced to the background story and insights. They had already prepared campaign material when we got involved. It was only because we questioned what they meant in some campaign headlines that the marketing team realized that they had made an inside out campaign that no one outside of the company would probably understand.

That is why you need to have someone supply that outside-in perspective from time to time. You cannot see yourself from the outside. You will need a fresh pair of eyes to qualify your ideas and messaging.

From our experience, this can easily be factored into your workflows with trusted people from the outside brought in at the right time in the process to assist on the idea- and concept-generation. But more on this in a later chapter.