The Boots Company plc
Claire Astill comments "At Boots, as a marketing category manager, I was part of a team charged with managing the whole process of our agency review. This was a huge and extremely challenging brief. The attached article gives some insight into our issues. We engaged 4C as our support consultants and we worked very closely with Johan Denekamp, 4C's Director of Marketing Services. We chose 4C because Johan had previously worked as Chief Operating Officer of several of the largest agency groups and therefore his senior inside knowledge was very attractive to us (and because as a procurement department we had already used 4C for some benchmarking services).
With his background Johan immediately grasped the dynamics of the different agency relationships, the sensitive issues and also the very complex nature of the project. His wise counsel and sense of humour kept me going through a very demanding few months. He worked closely with us to help us to develop the best structure for the new media/advertising agency. His insights into the agency psyche were invaluable as we wrestled with these structural issues. As a result of these insights we were able to clearly identify resources that increased the value of the agency services provided. It helped us to separate non-essential detail from the really important issues. Ultimately we think it has enabled us to build strong and sustainable relationships with our agencies.
As the article explains, due to the many aspects of this ground-breaking work, Boots not only won the 2004 CIPS Award for Innovation in Purchasing but we also won the overall Award. The whole team was delighted!"