The Story of 'Wild Onion': 2011

Ten years ago when we created Wild Onion in the UK, we said that brands needed to stop talking at customers and start to have conversations with them.  Our belief was that the internet and related digital technologies had made it easy for people to find out anything they wanted. What would become harder would be for them to find the right thing in the right place and at the right time, because there would be more voices than ever trying to attract their attention.

What they needed were voices they could trust. And that, we argued, created a huge opportunity for brands to engage with their customers more deeply than ever before.

Ten years later, we can say we were right. The most popular words in our marketing lexicon are now ‘engagement’, ‘advocacy’ ‘WOM’ and of course, ‘social’.  
Everyone wants to have a conversation with their customers.  But mostly, customers aren’t listening.  At least, they’re not listening to brands.

And whilst marketing executives know that TV isn’t going to deliver the numbers, they’ve seen no evidence that increasing investment in digital and social platforms will either.

That’s where we come in.  Just as consumers need a voice they can trust amid all the noise, so do marketers.  We don’t have a vested interest in any particular creative solution or media mix; that also means we’re not digital evangelists who want to move all your marketing money into ‘engagement programs’ or customer collaboration. Sometimes a good old-fashioned promotional strategy works far better. In fact we might even go further and suggest that you should outsource less to agencies and bring some of the skills and expertise in-house.

What we do have is decades of experience in which we’ve accumulated a casefile of literally hundreds of campaigns across all sectors, through all media, and in every region of the world. Not just the ones that worked, but the ones that didn’t.  This has helped us answer questions as diverse as:   

• How does an industrial manufacturer create a consumer movement to solve the world’s biggest problems?
• What are the differences between men and women online and what does that mean for brand strategies?
•  How do you increase sales and reduce new product development costs by engaging with your best customers?
•  What are the six secrets that every successful social media campaign shares?

So we’re not peddling yet another creative, media, digital, PR, branding or even engagement agency. What we are selling is a small group of very senior, very talented people who believe we’re at a ‘once in a generation’ moment where the way we’ve always done things isn’t working; who also believe that many clients know this and want to do things differently; but who have come to realise, sadly, that it’s a brief most agencies have failed to deliver against.

We think we know how to crack this brief,  now we’re looking for like-minded clients.

What we offer is a framework you can use to maximise the potential of what you’re doing already, and shape what you do in the future. It’s a simple framework, deliberately so to make it robust and capable of channelling limited resources into delivering against client's most important business objectives.