Have the wheels come off the Midland’s automotive supply chain?

Aston Martin this week snubbed Minworth, Birmingham (and many other places) in favour of a village in Glamorgan.

In a recent post I spoke of the benefits of having a close geographical partnership with your business partners.

Aston have bucked that trend (anyone would think they have better things to do than read this website).

Question is, why turn your back on a region seemingly teeming with craftsmen and specialist knowledge for a military town in Wales?

Well, no doubt local government has rolled out more red carpet than a Bond premiere and offered a multitude of freebies to seal the deal but surely so has every other local quango.

To get to the point, they need to stop competing.

I heard a couple of years back that Aston Martin were growing extremely frustrated at losing out on people to the likes of JLR. This was borne out by their CEO, Dr Andrew Palmer’s comments when asked about the workforce: “They’re here, they’re in Wales. You’ve got some wonderful universities, Cardiff University for example, you train great people. I believe this will retain youngsters in Wales and in Cardiff.”

He wants Aston Martin to be a big fish in a small pond. He wants people to want to work for them (and so he should, as a regular on the Cool Brands list) and this means not having all the local talent vacuumed up by your competitors.

And we understand this as one of the smaller agencies (25 folks) in the Midlands. Not from a staff perspective, we have a pretty good track record of retaining good people.

I’m talking about clients. It’s amazing how many of our clients come to us from the larger players in the industry. They come to us with tails of feeling unloved and being bottom of the pile – just a small fish in a big advertising pond.

Our ‘Get to the point’ proposition works for them. Their budgets aren’t rinsed through 20 folks turning up to each meeting (19 of which say nothing). We don’t go away from each briefing with reams of red tape to get through before work can begin on finding answers.

So, even though Aston Martin have overlooked our beloved city, we get it. That said, if they want to call on any experts who would love to work with such a prestigious brand, we’re not too far away.

As a leading Midlands digital agency, we too are part of the automotive supply chain working locally providing websites to Subaru, Isuzu and MG but we also undertake long distance relationships with Honda and Lotus.