The campaigns are improving. The targets are being hit. The reports look good.

The client’s business is still worse off.

It is an uncomfortable possibility for any agency owner. Your team can do everything the brief asks and still fail to deliver what the business needs.

Sometimes the brief was wrong from the start.

In the last edition, we explored how commercial context changes the decisions an agency should make. This time, the question comes earlier: have we agreed to solve the right problem?

This is a conversation I’m having increasingly with agency owners through ELEVATE. They want to move towards a more strategic role with clients, but their proposals, scopes and delivery processes often commit them to execution before the underlying problem has been properly explored.

I wanted to open that discussion up, so I asked Ant Finch and Sabya Mukherjee to share what they’ve seen when delivering the brief well would still have produced the wrong result.

A symptom can become a brief surprisingly quickly

Ant Finch, Vendor Rocket

Having worked brand side before moving into agency and consultancy roles, Ant has seen agencies deliver a brief perfectly while leaving the business worse off.

The starting point is often familiar: sales are down, ACoS is up or the Buy Box has gone. A visible problem becomes an instruction to act.

But that instruction can carry an assumption about the cause that nobody has tested.

Ant describes finding SKUs that cannot support advertising spend once Amazon’s terms and current costs are included. He also points to pricing, availability, range and vendor terms as problems that more advertising may be unable to resolve.

The team can keep improving the campaigns while the commercial problem remains.

His most useful intervention is sometimes a difficult conversation:

“I can deliver this brief brilliantly, but it won’t get you the result you need.”

That takes confidence. It also takes evidence and enough understanding of the client’s business to suggest a better response.

For agency leaders, the question is whether account teams have the time, capability and permission to have that conversation before delivery commitments are made.

When a pricing problem turned out to be something else

Sabya Mukherjee, Amazon Lead, Cobalt Consulting

Sabya shares an anonymised example of a brand whose third-party resellers were driving down its Amazon price, with margins falling alongside it.

One possible response was to tighten distribution arrangements. But most of this brand’s business sat outside Amazon, and any response had to work for that wider business too.

For this client, Sabya judged that a selective distribution approach would be costly, slow and difficult to enforce, while putting pressure on important distributor relationships.

Before committing to that route, his team asked a different question: how could these sellers afford to sell so cheaply?

Their knowledge of the product’s hazardous-goods classification prompted test purchases. Sabya reports that the parcels arrived through standard consumer delivery services without the hazard markings or declarations required by the carriers concerned.

The investigation pointed to sellers avoiding compliance costs that compliant operators had to bear.

The work changed accordingly.

The team documented the parcels, raised safety concerns with Amazon, escalated the evidence, referred the matter to the regulator and supported the brand in communicating the required standards to its sellers.

Sabya reports that multiple sellers were subsequently removed, pricing stabilised and margins recovered.

The distinction matters. This was a response to evidenced safety and compliance concerns. A low price alone would not have justified those actions.

The commercial value came from understanding the wider business, investigating the cause and choosing a response that addressed it. Better execution of the initial distribution idea would have taken the client down a different path.

What makes this strategic?

Neither contribution argues against strong execution. Sabya’s example depended on careful test purchases, evidence gathering and follow-through.

The strategic choice determined where that effort went.

Tactics answer questions such as: which campaigns should we change, which listings need work, which sellers should we investigate?

Strategy establishes the business outcome, the diagnosis, the constraints and the choices that make those actions worthwhile.

It also determines what the agency should recommend leaving alone.

This is where an agency’s access to information beyond the Amazon account becomes commercially important: product economics, distributor relationships, wider channel priorities, operational constraints and the client’s appetite for disruption.

Access alone is not enough. The agency has to use that knowledge to test the brief and secure agreement on what should happen next.

In Sabya’s example, the wider distribution business changed which response made sense. The account-level symptom could not settle that decision.

Does your agency make room for that work?

It is easy to describe an agency as strategic. The harder question is whether its commercial and operating model supports strategic work.

If the proposal commits the team to a list of activities before anyone has investigated the problem, there is little room to change direction.

If success is measured entirely through channel metrics, the team may be rewarded for improvements that do not translate into a better business outcome.

And if the account manager needs the founder’s intervention every time a brief needs challenging, the capability is difficult to scale.

A practical place to start is the next new brief or renewal. Before confirming the delivery plan, agree:

• The business outcome: what needs to improve commercially, and over what period?

• The diagnosis: what evidence explains the problem, and which assumptions still need testing?

• The constraints: which margins, relationships, resources or wider priorities must the response respect?

• The choices: what will we prioritise, what will we defer and what will we recommend against?

• The authority: who can approve a change to the brief, scope or budget?

That work needs an owner, time and a place in the commercial agreement. Where diagnosis is substantial, it may warrant a paid initial engagement before the ongoing delivery scope is fixed.

Calling an agency strategic creates an expectation. Its process has to make that expectation credible.

The brief is a decision too

Ant’s warning and Sabya’s example lead to the same test for agency leaders.

When a client arrives with a problem, does your agency primarily organise the work requested, or does it first establish whether that work will produce the result the business needs?

There is real value in being able to execute well.

There is also value in knowing when that execution should never have been commissioned.

When did your agency last change a client’s brief before agreeing how to deliver it?

With thanks to Ant Finch and Sabya Mukherjee for their contributions.