How 'not' to select a design partner for your brand.
For business owners (BOs), marketing heads and entrepreneurs, it’s extremely important to select the right people as partners in your brands journey right at the start. We get approached by many such BOs who eventually become our clients. Our interaction usually begins with statements like these:
”We’ve already burned our fingers once before”.
“We got this done from <insert MNC / overseas based design company>, but they’ve not finished the job, and we want to work with someone new.”
The sub-text here is, “We’ve exhausted a large portion of our budgets because what was done is either incomplete, ineffective, or our needs have increased. So we’re hoping you will compensate for that loss by giving us the same standard of quality, a large quantum of work but for a much lower price.”
We do understand this predicament, after all we’re a startup too. But we discovered that there exists an intrinsic problem in the parameters used to evaluate creative partnerships. This is an attempt to remedy that problem. Below are a few things you should not let influence your decision.
1. How large a studio/agency is.
In our early days, we had a one potential client enquire about our infrastructure. Questions like ‘how many people’, ‘how many computers’ etc. We didn’t get that project. Maybe because we only had 6 computers, while the client probably compared us to an agency that had 10.
Jokes aside, the hardest part about building brands is the cerebral component. And scale has little to do with quality of thinking or ideas. Scale, as a matter of fact, can be outsourced. What you’re looking for is a relationship between scale and competence, which perhaps exists in other sectors, but not always in design.
It doesn’t take an army to come up with a solid rationale, or a brilliant brand idea. All it takes is one sound creative mind, and a few more to play devils advocate. Some of the worlds biggest inventions and discoveries had a single person driving them. And that’s why the quality of creative partners is more important than the number of people in their team.
2. How much a design studio charges.
There are multiple aspects we take into consideration while calculating design fees.
a) The value of time: This is measured based on experience of talent and demand for time. It’s similar to how surgeons or lawyer fees are varied. The more experienced the designers are with building successful brands, the lower the risk for your business idea’s success. This also means they are in high-demand. And therefore their time is much dearer and accordingly priced so. Those who value the expertise, and are actually willing to pay for lowered risk get to work with them.
b) The price of high-impact solutions & lowered risk: Design directly affects the perceived value of a brand. Not just that, it lays the foundation for brands to grow. Design can also help save money spent on other expensive channels of communication or launch activities/material that would ordinarily be necessary for the category. Eg. if you’re aiming to sell a 100 crores worth of apartments, and design enables you to reach that goal, then design becomes a necessary investment for business. Just like construction or product manufacturing is. The better the design process & quality of work, the higher the impact, the lower the risk of not achieving your business goal and often times lowered cumulative expenditure. The sector of the brand/product/service indeed does affect the design fee. It’s less about how much money you have, but how much money you can make. And if you believe a specific design studio can help you get there, then you should believe they are worth it.
3. Past experience in the same category.
It’s a perfectly valid criterion. If it’s an important consideration for when you hire a key member of your team, then why not whilst evaluating a branding studio?
A strong design process thats rooted in strong logic is usually universally applicable (give or take 15%) to any business in any sector. Most successful design studios would have their own version of this. Ask them to explain it. And then evaluate if it’s the right choice for your project.
Having prior experience in a specific category does not guarantee better output. The inverse would also hold true. Having no experience does not guarantee poor output. An expected argument to this could be that familiarity in the category could be valuable in order to foresee potential mistakes, challenges, or help to simply be up-to-date on category trends.
The truth is that none of this is rocket science. It needs to be learned, observed and above all, current. The market and consumer sentiment is ever-changing and knowledge of a sector needs to be updated. Having prior experience in a category is only helpful, if and only if it is still relevant. In order to ascertain it’s relevance, any design studio would have to analyse the product and market from scratch anyway, so why let that be a filter for whom to work with?
4. How many awards they have won.
While award shows are a great way for design studios to have their creativity recognised, they don’t necessarily indicate commercial success. Most award shows award agencies and studios based on pure creativity and creative execution of ideas. Not all ideas however would work in the real world. This isn’t to say that real work that is published is not award-worthy or can’t win. There have been plenty of instances of actual work that was successful for a business, that has won awards for creativity too. To us, that’s admirable and we applaud it.
And then there’s the school of design studios (and agencies) who have ideological differences with many award shows, and therefore do not participate. That does not mean they do not believe they are creative, or they can’t win. Perhaps they do not believe in the judging methodologies of the organisation or maybe they fundamentally don’t agree with this sort of rewarding system – That the real success of a brand created by them is reward in itself.
We’ve created a bunch of successful brands, with no awards in our kitty. Now lets flip that around. Having won no awards, does not make any of the work we have done for brands unsuccessful.
TLDR: The number of awards won are not necessarily an accurate representation of competence.
5. If they are a one-stop shop.
From an operational stand-point, it’s always great to have one point of contact that orchestrates the 100 moving parts. Especially if you want to keep a lean organisation with no dedicated marketing team. Generally speaking, most independent design studios are specialists in branding and design. They prefer to work as brand custodians, who conceptualise and design everything, but bring on board the right kind of expertise for the different media they need to address. This helps in two ways -
a) Every project is different and requires a different set of experts. This allows us to have access to a wider pool of resources that we cherry pick from for the project, based on the experience and expertise required. This essentially means you get to work with the best talent that your money can buy.
b) It’s very difficult at the start of the project to predict what type of skills one will need to bring on board. For instance, a film could be executed in 2D animation, live action, stop motion or 3D animation. Until we’ve started the creative work and crossed a key milestone in the journey of the brand, we can’t say what kind of film we would be making, or if we would even be making a film. That’s why design studios don’t keep these resources on their payrolls. We prefer to brief them, coordinate and supervise all the work done by them and ensure it fits perfectly in the bigger picture for the brand roll-out.
On the other hand, agencies that supposedly do ‘everything’ remind us of ‘Multi-cuisine’ restaurants. You know, the ones that serve Chinese, Indian and ‘Continental’ food, but aren’t exceptionally good at any. Try and gauge the core competence of the studio, the founders or agency. That’s what you should hire them to do.
6. Proximity & Geography
If there's only one thing we’ve learnt from this pandemic is how to stay connected despite being under a countrywide lockdown and living with a very real risk to our lives. Work at Glyph during the initial period of March to May had come to a near-standstill. But come June, we were back in action, working in full-swing. There’s definitely been a learning curve when dealing with the transition of how to brainstorm remotely, how to share sketches, WIPs, discuss half baked concepts etc. At Glyph, we miss the idle banter, the infectious creative energy that would be palpable during brainstorming sessions, getting to know each other better through our playlists and what we brought for lunch. We’ve adjusted our methods and are more productive now than ever before. We waste less time travelling to and fro from work and meetings, which keeps us high on energy and low on stress + anxiety.
Most design studios have managed to work with their numerous clients over the phone, email and video conferencing. Whether it’s your friend who lives down the road, or your overseas colleague, you’re communicating in the same way. Never before has proximity for the sake of efficiency been more redundant.
8. If they are yes-men.
We know that CEOs have a tonne to do. Especially those bootstrapped, lean, mean, micro-managing machine types who are racing against time to get things done. A smooth relationship with your brand partners often means a short journey from idea to execution. But smooth must not mistakenly mean subservient. Your design partners can save you a lot of time (and money) in the long run if they ask the right questions. They may not agree with you every time, but hear them out. It’s never personal, but always a good idea to consider the conflict. This is a rather common leadership tactic, really. But the point here isn’t leadership. We’re talking about an equal partnership in the truest sense of the word. The design studio and client relationship should be one of checks and balances. More so when time is short. They may be seeing a hurdle that you haven’t. Or a loophole which needs to be plugged to avoid a future backlash. It’s your choice whether to act on their advice, but it would be their obligation to let it be known. Don’t crucify them for it or label them as ‘uncooperative’ or ‘difficult’ to work with. You see, us designers, we work best when we have conviction. Do us the courtesy of explaining your point of view. We’re on the same team after all.