Aprais not limited to agency-client relationships

Aprais, the UK-based global relationship appraisal service, doesn’t want to limit itself to agency-client relationship assessments. It will soon venture into other areas of partnerships such as that of an automobile company with its component manufacturer or a shoe brand with its design partner.

Aprais also plans to bring the tool it uses in developed nations, Relationship Measurement & Management (RMM), to developing nations such as India. Of course, the tool, which will be called Aprais Headline, will be suitably adapted to suit the requirements of developing nations.

The company, which was launched in India in mid-2005, has recently been appointed globally by food major Nestle. This is the first client that Aprais has bagged in India. At present, Nestle has empanelled five agencies in India for its products – McCann-Erickson, O&M, Lowe, JWT and Publicis India.

Sunil Gupta, country head, Aprais, India and Sri Lanka, talks about the association with Nestle, “In some of our offices such as New Zealand and Australia, we have helped Nestle manage its agency relationships. Witnessing the progress in those markets, Nestle recently decided to become our worldwide partner.”

He adds, “Since Aprais is only a few months old in India, it took us some time to put the systems here in place. Nestle is our first client in India. We hope to help Nestle work better with its agencies with our evaluation system and other tools.”

Nestlé has appointed Aprais to implement a global evaluation system that will help measure and manage more than 300 of its agency relationships worldwide.

Gupta is quick to clarify that Aprais is not an audit firm; it facilitates smooth agency-client partnerships with an honest, unbiased evaluation system in place.

Surely, bringing such a new concept to India and making clients and agencies understand its importance can’t be an easy job. Gupta admits, “In 2006, our immediate goal is to feed this concept to agencies and clients and make them realise the need to have such a system in place.”

Gupta adds that MNC clients such as Nestle will help propel the operations of Aprais in India.

The Aprais system hopes to enable both Nestlé and its communication partners to review and compare their performance across brands, geographies and categories using consistent criteria.

For the record, Aprais has an online 360-degree evaluation system which reveals how both the client and agency view their own and each other’s performance across certain key measures. The findings are then benchmarked over a period of time. The appraisal takes place every six months.

Aprais was originally launched in 1998 and now has offices across Europe, North and South America, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. Globally, some of its partners include Nestlé, Renault, Rabobank, Nissan, Toyota, Kimberly-Clark, Ogilvy & Mather, McCann-Erickson, JWT, Emirates Airlines, Lowe, Saatchi & Saatchi, Publicis India, DDB, BBDO, Dentsu Marcom, OMD, Starcom, Mindshare, TBWA, Grey, Vodafone and Philips.

© 2006 agencyfaqs!