Prior to her current role as CEO, Anne-Marie has served in several positions at VSA over the past 20 years, including Associate Partner of Strategy, Head of Client Engagement, and President. This depth of experience across different disciplines at VSA makes Anne-Marie especially adept at both steering the high-level strategic vision and ensuring its day-to-day implementation. Anne-Marie’s passion for leading relationships from a strategic, consultative perspective builds true partnerships that advance both business and brand, resulting in many enduring client relationships.
VSA’s CEO Anne-Marie Rosser was recently interviewed by Top Interactive Agencies (TIA), where she talked trends, human nature versus data, and the thing people are most surprised to learn about her. See the interview below, or view the original piece.
I started out in an account role function but really felt that I was doing the strategy lift. At the time, I asked our CEO if I could start a strategy function and he said “sure.” So, I played in the strategy space for about 15 years at a few agencies, and then ultimately decided I wanted to apply what I had learned in strategy to grow relationships in a more consultative way. I did that for about 10 years before moving into a role as agency president and then CEO.
The food and the people! It’s a beautiful city that has scale—but also has great neighborhoods and can feel small. It’s a very livable city. It also has a great food scene with anything you can imagine. Like any city, it’s really about walking the neighborhoods to get a feel for it.
It’s been a really transformational time in the industry at large, and for our agency. So much so that our attention can get very fragmented. My focus now is on prioritization and execution. It’s easy to get distracted, but execution is still imperative, and that requires the ability to prioritize what is most important and let some of the rest wait.
I’m still learning! As a relatively new CEO, this is one of my challenges. But I think it’s really critical that executives are close to the work to ensure their vision is relevant and achievable. In some ways, vision is the easier part. It’s execution—through the day to day—that determines your success. I have a really great team that challenges me and keeps me honest on both fronts as we try to reserve time that is focused on 50,000-foot issues and time that is reserved for day to day. This helps all of us change gears together.
I want people to experiment and not view it as a failure if an idea doesn’t work out. This doesn’t relate just to client work, but to our own internal structure and processes as well. Right now I think it’s about staying very close to culture and the pace of change, and encouraging teams to meet clients where they are while still having the courage of their convictions. We also have an internal drive to “own” ideas and innovation. We hold each other accountable.
There is more and more data that supposedly tells us EXACTLY what people want and where. I think it’s useful to take some of that data with a grain of salt because it is inherently backwards looking. People are unpredictable, so human-centered design in part means remembering the human tendency to surprise.”
Most recently, we rolled out a campaign for our client FactSet that I think really embodies that goal. FactSet is a global financial digital platform and enterprise solutions provider—it’s heavily in the B2B space. When we were designing the campaign for them, we thought about how so much of B2B advertising is frankly very boring and decided to do something different. The campaign has three different spots, and they’re all really funny! [You can check them out here.] We think that a smart departure like this from the category norms makes B2B brands stand out in a good way and keeps people thinking about that brand experience long after.
Honestly, I think it comes back to basics versus always focusing on just “what’s new” in digital. For an ecosystem to work, it has to have movement, and that means 1) know your audience and what they are about, and then 2) reduce friction as they move freely within the ecosystem. If you miss these fundamentals, the rest doesn’t work. I think the other secret is in your question itself: “prioritize.” As I mentioned a few answers ago, prioritization isn’t easy—it takes real discipline. Brands that can prioritize, which inherently means giving other things up, stand a much better change of thriving.
Relevancy is achieved by deeply understanding your audience and acknowledging that even once you know them deeply, you’re never done. You have to keep returning to that well to understand what has changed, because what’s relevant to them changes. Trends can be significant or fleeting, but certainly understanding cultural currency is important. It becomes truly meaningful only when you can connect it back to your specific audience and what they care about. So, I guess I’m less concerned about the trends that may stay or go, and more about how audiences are shifting their attention and why.
What a great question. Our purpose is to “design for a better human experience,” which is a lofty goal for an agency. But it’s because we fundamentally believe that behind every business or marketing problem is a human problem to solve. There is more and more data that supposedly tells us EXACTLY what people want and where. I think it’s useful to take some of that data with a grain of salt because it is inherently backwards looking. People are unpredictable, so human-centered design in part means remembering the human tendency to surprise and remembering to have empathy for a real human problem that needs to be solved. Sometimes trusting your gut and pushing to disrupt the data is the best way to think about where human-centered design will go because it looks forward rather than back.
I would have to say TikTok is the platform or emergent player that I still say “wow” to in terms of how disrupting it is. It is fundamentally changing our relationship with all content—news, information, brands, entertainment. Building off of what social platforms started, TikTok is changing information and commerce more profoundly. The biggest takeaway for me is the serious shift in our attention span and how information is consumed. The ongoing shift from a “broadcast to your audience” model to “show up where the conversation is already happening” has big implications for everyone, and I don’t know that we’ve fully cracked the code on what it will mean.
It’s alive and well. I am seeing small startups of every stripe, including agencies, pop up everywhere and do great work. Chicago remains a place where people are more focused on the ideas and the work than the marquee, so I think that’s a real strength.
VSA brings brand strategy and activation to the table for MTP. Our deep design heritage and consultative style allows us to go deep with clients to drive results. MTP’s belief that agencies can still be independent while benefiting from shared values and collaboration is part of VSA’s ethos and how we work.
This is such a great question. As a parent with three kids nearing college age, it’s one I’m asking! I absolutely think that creatives can break into this industry through routes other than traditional education. The most important attributes are having ideas, communication skills, and the ability to collaborate.
Designers, creators, writers—they all play a huge role. We know that representation matters, so whether that is via illustration, casting, voice talent or accessibility in technology, they all drive our ability to reflect the world we live in with a more accurate and inclusive approach. It’s exciting. We don’t always get it right, but it’s something we continue to challenge our creative teams to think through.
My mom is an artist, and I think spending summers with her growing up in New York was very formative. Learning to see and appreciate aesthetics in all different areas of life is a huge part of my work life, but also my life outside of work. While I’m not a creative and came up through strategy, I am fascinated by the work that creative can do. I speak the language.
I’ve been a bookworm for life, and then just being outside, gardening, travel. All the good things!
There are so many! But I would say that issues around women’s rights are closest to me. This is because of my own experience, but also having three kids at a time when access to women’s rights are being reduced. I’m also very cognizant of what has been changing in the workplace for women and how I can model the type of behavior and leadership that I feel women should be able to claim for themselves. There is still a lot of “micro-misogyny” out there: exclusionary behaviors, mansplaining, lack of confidence in a different leadership style that favors listening as much as pontificating.
People tend to be surprised by my sleeve tattoos. That’s not the vibe I give off when people first meet me (apparently).
Companies don’t always use data to power their brand positioning shifts. Often, it’s a subjective exercise that reflects what internal stakeholders are experiencing when they interact with customers.
That subjectivity can be dangerous for brand positioning work because it can root your brand in promises and messaging that won’t last over the long haul and may not reflect the needs of high-value growth targets.
When clients come to VSA for brand positioning work, we usually suggest their brand positioning journey start with Promise to Performance®, our proprietary quantitative research methodology.
Promise to Performance (P2P) was specifically designed to identify the key ingredients of a brand positioning that is true to your business, relevant to your customers and different from what your competitors are saying. In other words, it’s everything you need, and nothing that you don’t.
P2P provides the answers to three key questions that will help you prioritize the brand promises you should focus on in your brand positioning:
In this piece, let’s focus on promise alignment to high-value audiences—why we approach it the way we do and why it matters for brand growth. We’ll cover the other two areas in future pieces.
Our approach starts with prioritizing across a long list of potential needs—about 20 unique statements, on average—to find out which are most important to each respondent in the survey. The need statements are custom written for each study to capture a range of functional and emotional needs that represent different potential priorities within your particular audience.
We then use need segmentation to define the audience cluster groups. With any segmentation exercise, there are typically foundational needs that all segments identify as important for the category. These needs are important to be competitive in the category—so it’s important to have them covered—but they are not usually differentiating.
Here’s an example: We worked with a company that offers a technology solution for small businesses. First, we surveyed their total audience, and then we performed a need cluster analysis to reveal audience segments with different priorities representing unique mindsets. In this case, all SMB segments have similar reliability and service need priorities.
One of the big benefits of doing need-based segmentation is that it can uncover the hidden gems. These are the needs that don’t immediately rise to the top in overall audience ranking of importance, but they can actually carry outsized weight for certain audiences.
For a differentiated position, we want to isolate those needs that are uniquely important to different customer segments, and then act on them.
On average we find about 4.0 segments with each study, and each segment has an average of about 3.6 needs that shape that segment—meaning, they are both important to the segment and more important for that segment compared to the audience as a whole. Often, segment-defining needs are lower ranking overall, but they over-index in importance for a particular segment. In fact, when we looked back across our P2P studies, we found that 82% of segments have at least one middle-of-the-pack need. And 45% had at least two.
Take our SMB technology provider’s audiences. You can see that some of their needs are foundational to all audiences, and some are unique to just that segment. All segments believe that reliability and great customer service are important, but within each segment there are more nuanced needs that define that particular audience.
Based on these defining needs for each segment, we can now align product capabilities, brand strengths and other reasons to believe to inform both our positioning and our messaging to the opportunity segments.
And in fact, you shouldn’t try to be. As brand marketers face tighter budgets and scrutiny over returns, you need to focus your energy where it will have the most impact. Segmenting your audience based on needs allows you to see which ones have the highest potential for growth and which ones you should deprioritize because they don’t align with the category white space and what your company can deliver.
The risk of overlooking some of the middle-of-the-pack needs becomes particularly impactful when those needs are priorities for your high-value segments. That means more likely than not, there’s something important to your high-value target that’s lurking below the surface.
Back to our technology provider example: Of the four segments, we found that two of the groups (Control Seekers and Tech Skeptics) provided no opportunity for growth at all because of their complacent mindsets toward technology.
And then we found that one additional segment (Customer Advocates) was important but wouldn’t provide the kind of growth the company was looking for.
The fourth segment (Edge Seekers) was where the real opportunity was, and where the company could focus its positioning to accelerate growth. This is a group that (1) has one-third of the market size at 36% and (2) is actively seeking a technology that can grow its business. Both the segment’s size and its mindset make it ripe for growth—and a prime audience to focus on for positioning.
This approach yields more precise, differentiated positioning that will stand out from a sea of vague brand generalities, as well as ensure that the brand is focused on the places where it stands to gain the most. You don’t need to ignore your lower-growth audiences, but you can write positioning that primarily focuses on the accelerator groups while still appealing to the lower-priority audiences.
One of the best parts of P2P is how actionable it is.
After we identify our segments, we then build profiles of these different audience members that includes their needs and how to talk to them. These profiles easily onboard your marketing and sales teams to craft messaging that speaks directly to the things these prioritized audiences care about most. Using these audience profiles, you can also relate the need-based segments to other “addressable” audience profiles that your teams are using, which can serve as a great complement to demographic segmentations.
If you’d like to work with a partner that can identify the key ingredients of a brand positioning that is unique, ownable and aligned to your audience’s core needs, we’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch here to learn more about P2P and how it can work for your business.
Addison Group, a prominent professional services firm specializing in staffing, consulting and executive search, recently rolled out a new website and refreshed brand. The change comes as Addison Group celebrates 25 years of empowering people through its tailored talent solutions, and embodies its commitment to the people it serves.
To conduct the brand refresh and website redesign, Addison Group tapped VSA Partners, a creative and branding agency. From messaging and strategy to graphic design and website implementation, the agency partnered with Addison Group across the rebrand and activation process.
“Very early in our work together, we uncovered Addison’s unique commitment to building long-term relationships with candidates and clients. That became the central truth that guided all of our work together, including its new mantra: ‘No one gets talent like Addison Group,’” said VSA Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director Bill Maday. “From specialized staffing solutions to consulting, this idea encapsulates the breadth of Addison Group’s offerings and their dedication to the real people they serve.”
With this mantra in place, VSA reimagined the Addison Group brand by centering it on what makes Addison Group so special: its people.
“Addison Group does a lot. But what all of our different offerings come down to is pretty simple, and that’s understanding people,” said VP of Marketing, Talent Solutions, Michael Barry. “VSA has been a great partner in keeping our brand messaging and visuals focused clearly on what sets us apart as a business, and unifying all our offerings underneath a clear and compelling vision.”
The new brand system is anchored by the hero graphics affectionately known as “gems,” which are a playful nod to the caliber of talent Addison Group recruits and supports. The gem shapes are flexible containers that can be used as framing devices as well as connective elements, particularly between Addison Group’s new people-centric photography styling. Other aspects of the larger brand system include a fresh and elevated color palette, custom iconography, and a friendly display typography.
VSA then took these foundational elements and translated them into a website redesign, teaming up with Dapper Digital to execute front- and back-end development. Along with a visual refresh, the team workshopped Addison Group’s user journeys. The workshop findings resulted in a focused navigation structure and an overall better user experience for two key audiences—job seekers and hirers—as well as improved usability for Addison Group’s internal teams.
“At the heart of this project was a focus on clarity and user experience,” said Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director YanYan Zhang. “Part of that was pulling the brand strategy—Addison Group’s story and purpose—through all the content on the site in a really clear way. And the other part of that search for clarity was getting precise on the user journeys, and how we could easily guide people toward the information and pages that are most relevant to them.”
As the talent acquisition landscape becomes increasingly competitive, Addison Group’s enhanced digital presence ensures it remains a go-to partner for businesses seeking specialized talent solutions. The website refresh is a key component of Addison Group’s broader strategy to leverage digital tools to better serve its clients and candidates.
