Marketing ; South African advertising industry ; Entrepreneurship

Early one fresh April morning in 2004, Dale Hefer, Managing Director of ChilliBush Marketing and Communications, entered the new building that she had recently acquired. She had started ChilliBush five years previously, operating from her Johannesburg garage. In contrast to her experience whilst working for larger agencies, she had aimed to provide a through-the-line marketing service, offering top drawer client service, appropriate creative ideas, quick turnaround times and a realistic pricing structure. Her insights had paid off handsomely, with billings exceeding rand 1 million after her first year of operation and reaching more than rand 18 million by 2003. Hefer and the other two Directors she had recruited, Glen Jordan and Les Broude, knew that they had to attract the big brands if they were to reach the billings target they had set of rand 36 million per annum by 2006. In order to do this, the three had decided that they would differentiate the agency by developing a process that would formalise their approach to integrating strategic thinking with the creative process, whilst including a remuneration process that was based on risk. They had taken it a step further by actually registering a holding vehicle for this process, calling it 'Creategy'. The question was whether Creategy(TM) would, in fact, give ChilliBush a competitive advantage. Did it really add value in terms of the aims of Hefer and her team, or was it merely a great-sounding name that would mean nothing in the long run and, in fact, could decrease the profitability of the business?