BY MATTHEW BIRCHARD 

“Soup to Nuts” includes everything start to finish.  It’s all inclusive. An outsourced marketing department should provide all services needed.

I once had a boss who often used the term “soup to nuts” when excitedly talking about new clients.  I finally had to Google what that really meant and discovered it’s derived from the fact that meals would often start with soup and end with nuts as dessert.  Thus, the saying “soup to nuts” referred to the whole meal and later came to be used to describe almost anything that was complete or all inclusive.  This is the sort of marketing service our agency offers.

Most meetings I have with prospects get into discussions about the “everything-else-ness” that they need.  The agency may have first been contacted just for a logo or a website, but through discussion it becomes clear that the prospect will need a whole lot more.

We’ll get started with the logo (call it the soup), but marketing needs are rarely ever finished (the nuts).

To truly offer full-service marketing, I’m a firm believer in the benefits to the client of having an agency that can handle everything thrown at them.  Projects large and small, even “special requests” from the department head, owner or CEO are handled as if we were an in-house resource.  Nothing really will phase us, though we’ve been surprised on a number of occasions by the sort of projects we’ve been tasked with.  As long as it moves the client forward, we’ll find a solution.  For Rains | Birchard Marketing, full-service really is “soup to nuts” — I find I’ve used the expression myself more than once.