Imagine a startup preparing for a major funding announcement. The company has a product, a leadership team and a story it believes deserves attention, but it needs help getting that story into the market. Several PR firms are interested in the business, and each one arrives with an impressive presentation.
The question is what happens next.
Marketing Crunch is launching around a simple premise: companies should have another way to evaluate the PR firms and individual marketers they are considering. The new website is positioning itself as the “Rotten Tomatoes of tech marketing,” bringing a review-based model to the world of marketing and public relations.
What Does A Marketing Firm Look Like From The Outside?
From the outside, most marketing firms have many of the same ingredients. There are service descriptions, client logos, successful campaigns, executive biographies and examples of previous work. These materials can tell a prospective customer what a firm wants to emphasize, but they may not provide the complete picture.
Marketing Crunch is designed to introduce reviews into that picture. By creating a platform specifically for evaluating PR firms and individual marketers, it gives prospective clients another source of information when researching their options.
That distinction is important because marketing is not simply a transaction. Companies often work with agencies and individual professionals for months or years, making the relationship itself part of the value.
What About The Person Doing The Work?
An agency’s brand can be recognizable, but clients ultimately interact with people. The strategist developing the campaign, the PR professional communicating with journalists and the account lead managing the relationship can all have a direct impact on the experience.
Marketing Crunch’s inclusion of individual marketers reflects that reality. A professional’s reputation does not necessarily begin and end with the agency where they currently work, particularly as marketers increasingly develop their own professional identities.
A review platform that covers individuals as well as firms therefore creates a broader view of the marketing market.
Could Reviews Change The Buying Process?
The traditional process is unlikely to disappear overnight. Companies will still want to see previous work, understand pricing, meet potential partners and speak with references before signing an agreement.
Reviews could nevertheless become another checkpoint along the way. A company might discover a firm through its website, investigate its previous work and then look for reviews before deciding whether to start a conversation.
That would make the review platform part of the research process rather than the entire decision-making process.
The Bigger Experiment
The more interesting question surrounding Marketing Crunch may be what happens when an industry built around reputation has a dedicated place for reviewing reputation.
PR firms and marketers have always been judged by clients and peers, but much of that judgment has remained behind closed doors. A public review platform could bring some of those opinions into a more visible environment.
Marketing Crunch is therefore launching with a concept that is easy to understand but potentially significant in practice. If companies begin using reviews alongside portfolios, referrals and case studies, the platform could become another piece of the way marketing talent is discovered and evaluated.
The idea behind Marketing Crunch is ultimately less complicated than the industry it is entering: before hiring the people responsible for building a company’s reputation, why not see what the market has to say about them?
