"The Strategic Alliance" has become a hot topic in the past few years. But most of what has been written on the topic focuses on cooperative efforts between large enterprises or joint ventures between Fortune 500 companies. At a time when many marketing departments are outsourcing more work, Travel Marketing Decisions takes a look at strategic alliances for travel marketers who want to get the most-and the best-from their outside consultants and agencies. No matter whether your organization is large or small, a "strategic alliance" with your marketing services partners can take your team from average to peak performance and propel your marketing efforts to new levels. To provide an insight into how this type of strategic alliance can work-and why-we asked one such marketing team to reflect on how it works for them. The following is excerpted from a conversation among Jonathan Day, Director for the Americas of the Queensland Tourist and Travel Corp. and the principals of his two marketing consultancies: Cynthia Fontayne, CEO of The Fontayne Group, QTTC's PR firm, and Greg Thomas, CEO of Greg Thomas and Associates, QTTC's advertising and design firm.

Jonathan: OK, for starters, I'll put myself on the spot: What makes a "good" client? I think a good client is going to be able to recognize the value that the consultancy is adding to the organization. You must be willing to give the agency some scope to add value to put their creative edge on the things that they're going to do. A good client also has very clear long term goals and knows what he or she want to get out of the relationship, and shares these goals and expectations.

Cynthia: It's frustrating when a client hires you because they think you can bring some special added value to their marketing process, and then they try to turn you i nto an order taker. They've hired the head, they're paying for our head, but they only want to use our hands. They miss the value of our head, not to mention our heart and the soul.

Greg: Too often we run into a client who will hire us based on our skills, but then don't recognize our ability to analyze a situation and suggest solutions. A bad client for me is somebody who has something preconceived, and they're using us simply to implement that idea, good or bad. A good client is somebody who understands that they have a marketing problem or a communication need and works with us to help them solve it.

Cynthia: I see we've gotten right into Bad Clients, and you're right. They look at us in terms of the tasks that we can perform as opposed to how can we participate in the strategic process. Our successful client relationships-when I say successful I mean ones where we're all enjoying the work and achieving the goals-are when we're truly part of the team.

Jonathan: A good client organization will involve its strategic alliance partners in the planning process. Even the strategic planning process. We want our marketing services companies to be involved in our entire marketing planning, even though you might only be implementing an aspect of it I want you to know our strategic marketing goals so that you can see where you fit and look for synergies that I can\rquote t see from where I sit.

Cynthia: Exactly. And sometimes as we see a plan developing at a higher level, we can see how a minor tweaking to that plan might help to have a much bigger impact when we get down to the implementation level.

Greg: The thing that is paramount in a successful relationship is trust. I think that's a good client, too, somebody who's willing to take a risk which might cost some money but has faith in the team he has chosen. Our collaboration on the development of a "look" for the QTTC in the last couple of years is a good example. You've trusted your "vendors" to get you to the place where you want to be. And you haven't dictated how it should be. You've given us guidance in terms of what final outcome you want. That helps us because it gives us the impetus to be creative, and creativity for us is the name of the game.

Cynthia: I think it was Thomas Edison who said that every time he'd work on an experiment that didn't work out, he wouldn't consider it a failure. He'd say, "I have successfully discovered another way not to do this." So, a good client doesn't just blow their stack or fire the consultant because one idea didn't work out. A good client weathers the ups and downs which are inevitable in the creative process.

Jonathan: I think what Cynthia is talking about is the idea of shared responsibility. In a strategic alliance I consider that we have a shared responsibility to get the job done. So I'm not just throwing it at you and saying it's got to be done; I'm depending on you as part of the team.

Cynthia: So a good consultant is someone who takes the trust that the client has placed in them very seriously. A good consultanting firm measures its success by the client's success, seriously taking on the client's goals and challenges and ups and downs as part of their own. You really have to be passionately committed to the client's success as if it were your own success, because it is.

Greg: I think for us, too, in a successful relationship is loyalty. Trust and loyalty.

Jonathan: And probably respect in there as well, mutual respect.

Cynthia: It underscores the fact that this is about relationships between people, and it's up to the individuals who are part of this team to make it work.

Jonathan: You don't really have strategic alliances with companies, you have it with the account team and the people on the account team. So, let's turn the tables. What makes a good consultancy. I'll go first. A good consultancy to me first of all meets the competency criteria of their specialty. So, they're competent designers. They're competent public relations persons. They're a competent direct mail company. And then beyond that, they think beyond competency, so they are proactive in improving our output, or our relationship, so they're meeting the things that I want to meet, but then beyond that they're looking at ways to do things better, to reduce my costs, to reach my market in exciting new ways, so they're one active, but two they're proactive, working with me, and those are the two things that I want from my relationships, and it's very easy to get the first, because there are lots of competent people out there, but a good strategic alliance as opposed to just a vendor relationship will have the second component as well.

Greg: It's an organization, so for me an important client is one that has not only the leadership personality that you can get along with, but the support staff that understands our role and helps fulfill our needs.

Cynthia: A good consultancy will have an on-going educational process within the client team and either through weekly meetings where you bring your entire team together and when I say the entire team, I'm talking about the person who answers the telephone. I'm talking about interns. They should all know at least the highlights of the client's organizations and current goals and activities. Depending on their role, but you can decide different levels and different depths of information that they need to have.

Jonathan: From my point of view it's that we are agreed-that we set goals and we set the output that we require and then together we meet-and then exceed-those goals. And it's really that simple. That's success. If all this soft stuff that we're talking about is working, it is going to have hard consequences. I know we're touching on a lot of the things that my friends who are accountants and engineers say..you're from marketing, oh, this is all soft and-

Cynthia: Touchy-feelie.

Jonathan: Touchy-feelie sort of stuff. My response to that is that this sort of touchy-feelie stuff actually has very hard bottom line consequences. And if we're doing this sort of stuff right in a marketing organization, then it will have very specific results.

Greg: Right, because if that stuff is working, it means that the client trusts the agencies enough to give them all the information and the latitude they need to produce superior results.

Jonathan: Yes. And I don't believe that in certain disciplines, in marketing particularly, that you can have good results at the bottom line unless you put a lot of energy into the people issues and the relationship issues. It's just a requirement. It's not like working on a factory line where inputs plus energy equals a certain output. It just doesn't happen that way in the knowledge/service economy.

Cynthia: You can carry that same idea through, not only in relationships between and among the team that's creating the marketing output, but with external contacts. For example, when we write a "pitch" letter to an editor to suggest a story, we're thinking of that person in a personal way. What do they need? What are their interests?

Jonathan: Exactly.

Cynthia: We're tapping into a personal relationship. When Greg is designing something, he's thinking about the persons who will be viewing it. How will they feel when they look at this image? When we write a press release, it's "will this information excite and serve the consumer?" So, in fact, we're considering the touchy-feelie, all the soft stuff is really what informs the work that we do and helps us produce better work.

Jonathan: So, let's sum up. Strategic alliances between and among people can be developed in any marketing organization. Trust, respect and loyalty are soft concepts that actually create concrete, quantifiable results that meet or exceed goals. Communication, shared information and expectations contribute to the bottom line. It works for our team, and it can work for anybody's team.