Tamara Bekčić, General Director and Milena Avramović, Executive Director, Co-founders of Agency Chapter 4

Every client isn’t just a story for itself, but rather an entire book. This book is constantly being written, grown and developed, and in that lies a special value that we build, providing strong communication support for the business goals of companies and their management teams on our market, reveal the co-founders and directors of Chapter 4, speaking to CorD

Your agency’s 10th birthday also provides an opportunity to celebrate the extraordinary business results that we congratulate you on. With what kinds of plans, ambitions and expectations are you entering the second decade of your work?

– Tamara: Thank you for the congratulations. We are very proud of this anniversary throughout the region, and most of all we’re proud of our team. We will continue to respond to the needs of clients and industries, investing in people and the “evidence-based” approach to effective and tailor-made communication. We have some interesting plans for the actual celebrations of our anniversary. It will be a real reward for the loyalty of Chapter 4’s people and clients, something not previously seen in Serbia.

A great team of carefully selected professionals and creative individuals, and relationships filled with trust that you’ve built with your clients, represent – we assume – your recipe for success. And what are the “spices”?

– Tamara: In everything we do, we nurture a clear strategic and ethical Chapter 4 approach and a combination of knowhow, skills, creativity and a way of thinking that’s unique to us. That’s why quality is primarily important, along with professionalism and a proactive approach, dedication, extraordinary knowledge of the client and their industry, analytics and constantly listening to the pulse of target groups and the market. What makes our job particularly dynamic and wondrous is the fact that every success we achieve today means nothing if we don’t have a plan to surpass it tomorrow.

Technology has changed us. Do you see changing the way communications develop as a good or bad thing?

– Milena: I often repeat that there has been a need for communication since there’s been a world, i.e. a need to convey and understand messages, and that means that essential communications have not changed much. The basis of good communication is comprised of four postulates: strategic approach, content, transparency and ethical approach. What has changed over the decades are the tools and channels that we use to reach our target groups in an optimal way. It is good that technological development and social networks have contributed significantly to faster communication.

Thanks to the internet, news from one corner of the world is now available to everyone in a matter of seconds, and it is up to us communicators to always be ready and to respond in an appropriate way. That is why those four postulates are extremely important, because they’ve brought only good to agencies that deal with communications consulting and communications departments within companies.

Your agency is said to distinguish itself from the competition due to its strategic approach to planning and implementing communications programmes, but also the communications training that you organise. What else makes you special?

– Milena: We approach every client and project in a unique way, inherent to a defined strategy. Each member of our team is specialised in a specific area, whether that’s ICT, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, finance, the automotive sector, cosmetics etc., which helps us to understand the essence of clients’ business goals and to create, on the basis of them, an appropriate communications strategy and to actively implement agreed plans.