Global marketing consultancy TrinityP3 is celebrating 20 years in business.
Founder and global CEO Darren Woolley says the secret to staying business has been curiosity.
“Rather than simply defaulting to ‘best practice’, we are constantly striving to develop an intimate understanding of the problems and challenges faced by our client base. We always question the underlying causes of problems," Woolley says.
“This enables us to continually develop and test new solutions to the new problems being caused by the increasing amount of choice and complexity faced by businesses today.
“Technology has revolutionised the way we communicate, socialise, and interact with brands. Global economics and market changes have massively impacted how business leaders make decisions and influenced how ‘strategy’ is defined and devised.
“So we’ve come a long way from our original vision of TrinityP3 as an independent facilitator between marketers and agencies which was very much a linear relationship.”
Woolley launched the business in 2000 after noticing a gap in the marketplace.
Marketers were looking for agencies’ help, so P3 was created to assist “people achieve commercial purpose through creative process.”
Over time, the company evolved from its linear roots to a new model which saw them connecting all their clients – marketers, procurement and agencies - forming the Trinity.
The impact of technology since the launch of TrinityP3 is often referred to as ‘disruptive’, whereas Woolley prefers a different perspective, maintaining that it has simply made solving issues and addressing challenges more complex and interesting.
He says that companies are still approaching him with the same fundamental questions as they had 20 years ago: How can they allocate their budgets more effectively? Are they working with the right agencies? And of course, are they paying too much?
Woolley says TrinityP3's approach to solving these issues has changed though.
Previously, client outcomes had been based on opting for one solution or another.
“Complexity isn’t about binary choices. The world is not black and white," he says.
"It’s a million different colours and you need to do the work and the thinking to make informed decisions in whichever part of the rainbow you’re opting to operate or exist at.”
To keep up with understanding the increasing number of options available to marketers, TrinityP3 has developed a culture that involves constant questioning and investigation.
While its clients can sometimes resist this approach because it feels more challenging, or because they were hoping for an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution, so too can the industry, which has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
“We were discussing performance and value-based agency fees back in 2007," he says.
"We identified the need to be able to measure collaboration between clients and their agencies so they weren’t overly reliant on relationship score cards.
“As a solution, we developed measures and benchmarks of productivity, not just costs.”
TrinityP3 has faced a few obstacles on its way to the market leading status they hold today.
Woolley says he can laugh today about the disastrous timing of some of his greatest commercial decisions, such as opening offices in Singapore and Hong Kong at the start of the Global Financial Crisis, or likewise in London on the day of the vote for Brexit.
But now all of that is settled and the future looks promising, with 2040 just around the corner.
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