IPA Publishes Practical Guide for Agencies to Evolve Their Pricing Models

The commercial relationship between agencies and clients needs to evolve beyond using only time-based models for pricing and embrace new thinking. This is the key premise of the IPA’s new pricing guide, launched at the IPA Business Growth Conference today (25th November), that outlines practical steps for agencies to build a sustainable commercial partnership with their clients.

Price for Success, has been commissioned by the IPA Commercial Leadership Group and written by marketing advisory Alchemists. Aimed at agency leaders and decision makers, it explores the nature of client-agency commercial relationships and details a three-phase process for any agency to follow to help them evaluate and establish a platform for commercial innovation.

The report specifically:

• outlines a new model of commercial partnerships, based on eight core commercial components

• allows agencies to assess six key pricing factors and to score themselves and their clients against them to arrive at the perfect combination of the eight different components

• provides a process and framework to successfully and appropriately price agency products and services

• answers real-life questions from IPA agencies, in recognition of the complexity of this area, to explain how some of the more common and interesting commercial challenges can be addressed


Says Marc Nohr, chair of the IPA commercial leadership group, group CEO of Miroma agencies and chairman of Fold7: “Unless agencies face up to the many and varied challenges they face commercially and change the way they price their products and services, they are colluding in their own demise. This report gives them the tools to skill up, get good at it, and ultimately secure their own future.”

Says Vlad Komanicky, founding partner, Alchemists: “Current agency commercial models are rigid and hinder innovation. We hope, therefore, that this guide will help agencies to adopt a process which allows greater agility and flexibility. By following this practical advice, it will enable agencies to build partnerships, comprising several commercial components, with clients. It will also allow an agency to understand where it is at any stage in the client and agency relationship. By identifying this, they will know where they stand in terms of the potential risks and rewards for any commercial partnership.” 

The guide is available to purchase from the IPA website (£25 for members and £50 for non-members).