Preferred vendor relationships have primarily been viewed over the last five to ten years as a vehicle for indirect procurement departments and cost consultants to wring out savings from the marketing production process. The logic has been that vendors will offer advantageous pricing in the expectation of gaining access to a sizable amount of work from a particular brand.

Preferred Vendor Relationships

referred vendor relationships have primarily been viewed over the last five to ten years as a vehicle for indirect procurement departments and cost consultants to wring out savings from the marketing production process. The logic has been that vendors will offer advantageous pricing in the expectation of gaining access to a sizable amount of work from a particular brand.

As change in the industry is thrown into hyperdrive by the global pandemic, brands would be wise to consider how direct partnerships with creative vendors build long term creative relationships and ensure stability in the creative execution process, while still looking to their agencies for high level creative and strategic ideation. Direct partnerships should be viewed from the vantage point of how to support the business needs, streamline production, raise the quality of production, create consistency.

However, success has been somewhat mixed because these efforts are generally directed at a group of vendors who are:
Already getting the work
Reluctant to alienate agencies by circumventing them in the process
Reluctant to negotiate with themselves to do the same work for less.

To date, there has been a lack of innovative thinking about how to define the scope of work on offer, how to identify the universe of potential vendors, and a lack of consideration of the broader value beyond cost savings. In fact, the notion of preferred vendor relationships goes far beyond cost savings.