Setup Partner Feature | Three Five Two

At Setup, we have the privilege of partnering with multiple established marketing agencies with groundbreaking business practices and leadership styles. In this series, we will highlight these leaders’ stories in order to inspire, educate, and unlock new ways of thinking to marketers.

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Today’s feature is Robert Berris, the Managing Director of the growth and innovation firm, Three Five Two.

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What gap did you see in the market that led you to found or be a part of your agency?

I joined Three Five Two 8 years ago as the VP of Strategy during a period of time when the agency was in search of more clients that needed our expertise to create and launch new business ventures and digital products. I was coming off a decade of working in advertising and was hopeful to find a company like Three Five Two where we could create a ton of value for consumers at scale, instead of simply trying to sell them something. 

As I learned about the market gaps, it became clear that we needed to help our clients far earlier in the product development and business lifecycle. Our role and capabilities had to include the discovery phase: finding consumer problems and opportunities that required new and desirable innovations, while validating the market size of the problem. In doing that, we developed areas of practice in growth marketing, business and product strategy, and qualitative research. 

What differentiates your agency from others?

This question always makes me smile. There’s a few big ones, I’ll try to limit myself to two.

First, many agencies work with clients who have a highly established product or service within a known set of customers inside of a market. We’re the complete opposite. 

We’re designed to work in the earliest stages of opportunity analysis, and from there, we help our clients navigate dozens of highly uncertain crossroads and decisions, to help them go from a customer problem to a product. That means we’re defining new customer segments and markets, developing key propositions, and creating new products and innovative business models that we’ve validated prior to going to market. Once we’re in-market, our role is to then validate and measure these market signals in support of iterations or pivots. 

So while we have a wide set of capabilities in our company, the narrowness of when we play is a massive differentiation.

Second, how we collaborate with our clients is massively different than many agencies. We co-create with our clients. This means we leverage our client’s subject matter expertise paired with our own expertise in finding, building and growing new opportunities to create a far more inclusive and collaborative working environment with our clients. 

Many people who’ve worked in and with agencies have experienced the “big reveal” style of workflow. This is where the agency develops a brief, the client approves the brief and some period of time later the agency creates lots of new ideas without the client present, as what amounts to be a mood board of ideas. While lots of people have worked with and for agencies in this way, this doesn't mean it’s a good way. I think of it like this, why would we create a HUGE missed opportunity to leverage our client’s expertise when interpreting new consumer insights and ideating ways to solve these problems? I think agencies tend to err on the side of “if we don’t create the ideas then what is our value?” when in reality, it should be, “if we don’t create a collaborative environment that has the best chance of truly divergent and inclusive ideas, we likely aren’t using the best minds to create this value.” As important, and frankly transformative for agencies, this process enables constant buy-in and alignment. You aren’t wasting weeks of time in a vacuum and then hope your client doesn’t blow up all your ideas because they weren’t a part of the process. 

I’m telling you, it’s a transformational experience for you and your client when you do it right. 

Are any of your personal values incorporated into the agency?

When I arrived here, we had great, team-oriented values that are still a part of the company’s DNA, but there was a personal value that showed up in my work over and over and it wasn’t until I had clients share the feedback with me, where it stood out as a value that should be important to Three Five Two.

A few years ago, my colleague Kacie and I were invited by a client of ours to be the only agency to present for their annual R&D executive meeting. We were geared up to conduct a workshop with about 45 executives on customer-centered innovation using design thinking. When we were introduced to the group by our client, she said, “As we all know, innovation is hard. It’s easy for many of us to fall in love with our solution and not the problem we’re solving. Kacie and Robert have been exceptional partners to our team over the last year and are the rare type of friends who will actually tell if you look fat in a dress. Our work is better today because of people who demonstrate true candor.”

And just like that, it became clear to me, “Be candid” had to become a key company value. Candor, shared respectfully, can cut through hierarchy and ego, when you create the right environment for collaboration.

Do you have any advice for marketers?

Become a facilitator. It continues to be the most unexpected and transformational skill in shaping how I work. It’s pretty similar to therapy. Someone acts as an objective mind in the room, to help others escape their familiar patterns of thinking and show them how their current thinking patterns might be right and wrong. 

Facilitation also separates the subject of a conversation from the people. In other words, it can be used to resolve conflict between employees, help clients ideate with stubborn executives in the room, and generate fast alignment when you observe people interpreting the same concept or even word differently. You’d be shocked if you knew how many times I’ve had to ask a room to define the word “value”. “We want to create value for our customers!” Cool, sounds great. Now let’s see if we can all define it to know what exactly we’re creating.

Become a facilitator, I promise you won’t regret it.