Why i dislike pitches

Juten Tach,
i work in the line of marketing, almost all the stuff we’re developing is somehow related to marketing. So the types of applications we build, are often content-driven yet not necessarily simple.
It seems to be a specialty of that business, that a lot of projects are announced via pitches, which is something i cannot understand from either point of view, although i am working in that field now for some years.
In many cases, the situation presents itself as follows: The customer has a basic understanding of what he wants to achieve with the project, but not necessarily how it can be achieved. That is not so much of a problem, that’s where the marketing agency jumps in and offers its services.
But the customer announces his project via a pitch, where several agencies are called to present ideas and implementations to the question how the goal of the customer can be achieved. So all these agencies start off and write down their ideas on how the goal can be achieved and they roughly describe how the idea could be implemented and of course what this would cost. The good thing here for the customer is, that he gets more than one idea and that he can choose the one, that he thinks to fit best.
The bad thing is, that it appears to me as if customers today do not simply choose the best idea but they also choose the best cost-calculation at the same time. That this doesn’t make sense, should become clear, if you think of two concepts going into different directions and thus implying totally different implementations and thus leading to non-comparable cost-calculations.
At this point you might think: “OK, he’s grumpy because his agency lost a pitch and he thinks the world is just unfair”. That is actually not the case. In fact i am currently writing the chapter “specification analysis” in my upcoming book and i was thinking about the process we’re going through in our agency when it comes to specifying the requirements in our projects.
Specifying requirements in a project, even if it is a rather simple online campaign is a catchy process. Customers may not articulate their needs correctly from the start, agencies might misunderstand the needs, problems behind the needs might be totally different than everybody thought and so on. Combining this important part of a project with the implementation and its cost-calculation in a pitch has two major drawbacks in my oppinion:

1. Since the agency had to deliver a rough concept of how the concept should be implemented together with costs, it is very hard to ever talk about the general idea again and if it is really the right approach. I think this is a major drawback, because really hitting the nail on the head, when it comes to specifying the needs of a customer is not possible in the usually two or three weeks, that an agency has for a pitch.
2. Second, the entries in the pitch are usually not comparable, because every agency has different ideas and concepts and thus different implementation strategies. I have heard sentences from customers, like: “.. but the other agencies have calculated that, too, so even if you think, it doesn’t make sense, please put the costs into your estimation, otherwise we cannot compare it”. I can totally understand the problem, the customer has in that situation, but it leads to calculations, that are not presenting the best solution to the customers problem.

So, what to do? In some rare situtations, we see pitches for the concept alone and the implementation is calculated separately. I think that totally makes sense and it should be done more often, because i think it leads to better concepts and better implementations. It gives both the customer and the agency the possibility to take their time in learning the requirements of the specific project and once that is understood, thinking about how to implement it. Of course, the drawback is, that the customer does not have an overview about the overall costs of the project beforehand. I would like to see studies on that issue. My assumption would be, that projects are more cost-effective, that separate concept from implementation in the described way.