Without research, strategy and planning, marketing programs trust their effectiveness to luck. Without impactful implementation, all the strategy in the world isn’t worth the paper it’s
written on.
So Smith Mumford & Co. addresses the full spectrum of marketing and communications disciplines. We’ll design and supervise a study or work with your existing research. We’ll prepare a marketing blueprint that is sufficiently complete for any competent firm to implement. We can then act as general contractor using our network of creative resources—or we’ll work with your preferred suppliers. We’re flexible about how we operate, as long as we can do it in your and our mutual best interests.
We have a small, seasoned staff that works on every phase of client projects. We don’t have senior people who sell the relationship, then hand you over to the people who do the real work. All we have is senior people.
Our internal capabilities include marketing research and analysis, strategic and creative direction, project management, business writing, and regional media relations. We bring in outside resources as needed for graphic design, electronic media production, and so forth. We have access to all, and only, the communications tools that make sense for a client’s situation. We don’t have a staff full of hammers, so we don’t fall into thinking that everything looks like a nail.
Our philosophy puts limits on the number of clients and projects we can take on at a time. We get to know our clients’ businesses intimately, and we like to have a hand in all or most of the marketing initiatives they undertake. We prefer relationships that are deep and long, though we are careful not to get too comfortable. We know we have to keep earning our clients’ trust and respect every step of the way.
In shaping our practice, we have pursued several themes:
Issue marketing—influencing public policy outcomes by reaching decision-makers, their constituents and the media.
Services marketing—making the intangible concrete and compelling, with particular depth in health care and financial services.
Business-to-business marketing—talking to people who are buying professionally, not personally, but are still behaving like human beings.
We identify with our clients’ goals. In addition to doing effective work, we try at all times to accommodate clients’ time frames, budgets and bigger-picture issues. In particular, we budget from the client point of view: “What needs to be spent in total to get the job done?” We don’t just say “Here’s our fees and everything else is extra and unpredictable.”
We also make an effort to understand clients’ politics and policies; we don’t shrug our shoulders and snipe at how client organizations operate. One of our strengths is the ability to engineer consensus within organizations and among coalition members.
Still, we don’t just take orders. We owe you our best thinking no matter how small the issue. We’ll advise you of the course of action most likely to achieve your goals, even if it’s not always obvious or easy or the one that you thought you wanted. Even as we do our “due diligence” as counselors, though, we know how to pick our battles and when it’s time to move ahead and focus on the finish line.
We help clients capture business opportunities and advance public-policy agendas.
We concentrate on helping organizations reach their audiences to achieve tangible outcomes. Those outcomes may take varied forms—capital investment, incoming contacts, revenue gains, perception shifts, or policy action—but we always strive for results that provide meaningful advantages to our clients.
Strategic thinking based on research intelligence is the cornerstone of our practice. We implement our strategies and action plans with exacting standards of communications effectiveness and client service.