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Strolling to Conclusions

Roads lead to alleys. Alleys lead to dead ends. And you can't see them all before you've entered into a client engagement—no matter how much of a "design expert" you say you are.

"I've done a ton of logos, so this project is a cinch for me. In the client meeting, I'll share with them some design themes I've been exploring when drawing up my estimate. Just some riffing, really... nothing too serious that I can't back out of when the paperwork is finalized... It'll just help me cinch the gig."

What a bad habit. Sure, we get excited about the possibility of a new project and start sharing initial impressions that come to mind. But sharing your opinion like that—off the cuff—can be very damaging for the project you're looking to start, your long-term relationship, and the design profession in general. It belies an assumption that you are more important than the gazillions of people out there that form the basis of your client's design problem.

Let me provide a few examples.

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy -- or a sales strategy, or a need to retool existing products or services due to customer feedback, etc.

To forge the right approach, quantify the business problem, qualify the competition, and distill what you've learned to show understanding of their need. This post talks about qualifying the competition and distilling what you've learned.

Qualify the Competition and How It Shapes the Problem

After the client presents the business problem and you ask necessary questions to understand its context, look at everything you can find that frames the problem from the competitor's point of view.

Clear business strategy is crucial for us designers in presenting proposals or participating in a pitch, where clients may intentionally refrain from disclosing key information to see how much you can glean and intuit from the scraps scattered across the media and the Internet.

You need to sniff out the business reasons for specific marketing initiatives through client interviews and research in order to ensure that you're making the most appropriate strategic decisions to solve their business problem.

You also need to show that you understand the world that your client lives in, understanding the trends that shape their industry.

This is different from traditional market research, which would live in your marketing strategy.

This is knowing which competitors are privately held, and sometimes more nimble, versus publicly traded. Which products in their industry are selling the best, and why. What the analysts from Forrester and other trending firms are saying about your industry category. What the Wall Street Journal noted in their most recent column on your corporate outlook. What is going on locally and globally on a cultural level that could have an impact on your business.

All these elements shape the world view that your client holds. Being able to present this kind of information, peppered through your ongoing communication, lets your client know that you appreciate where they're coming from -- and helps to support your creative strategy from a business perspective.

Distill What You've Learned to Show Understanding

The best trust-building exercise with a new client is reflecting back to them what they said, in an intelligent manner, with a few key learnings that they may not be aware of.

Whenever you write a proposal for a new project, you should begin the document with a narrative articulation of the client's business case and current strategy. This shows to the client that you understand their business needs at a high level, and any marketing recommendations that may follow are derived directly from their needs.

Always try to simply answer Who? What? When? Where? and Why? The How? is always proposed through what follows the business strategy: our marketing strategy.

As you craft this paragraph or two, be aware of your audience. As such, I make it as simple and quick to understand as possible. I always pretend, as I'm writing, that the CEO of the company could get their hands on this document. Besides, don't you want the CEO signing off on the dotted line and handing you that nice big project?

Continue on to Part 4 >>

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 2

See Part 1 here.

Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy -- or a sales strategy, or a need to retool existing products or services due to customer feedback, etc.

To forge the right approach, quantify the business problem, qualify the competition, and distill what you've learned to show understanding of their need. Let's talk about quantifying the business problem in this post.

Quantify the Business Problem(s)

New clients can articulate a wide range of business needs, but most often, their business requires short-term sales generation and stable, long-term growth in revenue that leads to profit.

Short-term sales are contingent on tactical marketing decisions. Long-term sales require a holistic view of all marketing communications and a full awareness of the client's brand equity and its increase in value over time. Solving a long-term business problem often requires making large assumptions, and since they are often not in your direct control, your marketing solutions will require some measure of flexibility.

Even if a client walks in the door requesting an awareness-generation campaign that has no sales metrics, it's inevitable that in the long-term view, they need to make money from selling their soda or flat-panel TVs.

With this in mind, I try to strip away the tangibles from a client request -- we need a new identity, help us improve our advertising -- and work backward into what business need is driving their request. I always try to understand how they arrived at this decision, and what needs to happen after the decision in the short and long term to ensure it has an impact.

Here's how some of these client requests can be translated from tactical requests into business needs, and then attacked as creative challenges.

If it's a short-term problem (1-3 months): I need to sell 5,000 loaves of bread by May 31st.

Why? Because I am $100,000 short on revenue this quarter and I need to fulfill our budget objectives to maintain our profit margin.

Why is this valuable to know? It allows us to determine if there are more creative approaches to bringing in the million dollars in revenue. Could we sell more pastries and dinner rolls along with the loaves of bread? Creative thinkers are good at thinking around business challenges to find these novel approaches.

If it's a long-term problem (4-12 months): I want to launch three new MP3 players over the next year and gain a 6% share of the MP3 market in sales, while raising our brand equity by 10%.

Why? We've lost 20,000 customers to our largest competitor in this space and our research has shown that our brand equity has decreased by 4 points due to our competitor's behavior. If this continues, we will take a net loss that may require selling off this portion of our business.

Why is this valuable to know? Knowing the reasons behind their request creates an opportunity to do due diligence. Can their business problem be solved with marketing alone? Over the long-term, what activities from both a business and a marketing perspective would be necessary to forge a clear plan of attack?

Remember to be respectful in how you ask clients for this information. Often, they are in trouble when they ask for your help, and want you to approach their request as an opportunity (a positive challenge), not as a problem.

Continue on to Part 3 >>

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 1

This is the era of design as more than just a strategic business initiative -- it's a way of life and a method of bringing creative thinking to rational, left-brained business professionals.

With the current shift from design as a decorative function to design as a business requirement, designers have been forced to equip an arsenal of tools that go beyond what we'd traditionally call design. As such, we designers have been appending the word "strategy" to everything that we do, perhaps in the belief that it creates a higher-level business orientation to our often intuitive decision-making process. Brand strategy. Content strategy. Design strategy. Interaction strategy. Media strategy. We've developed a strategic nomenclature that is like peeling back the layers of an onion. The list goes on and on and on.

But design within marketing as a core business function only has three fundamental strategies. These are what our clients recognize as indispensable foundations for any creative project, though they aren't all "creative" in the traditional sense. And design strategy can't exist without them.

1. Business Strategy

This is big picture thinking that encompasses the most important questions for any corporation: cash flow, product creation and distribution, and overall operations. Marketing strategy and tactical strategy fall out of overall business strategy and support the overall business needs.

To make a bold generalization: this is the area that designers often impact the most, with the least desire of input by the business principals. After all, we have BFAs, not MBAs.

2. Overall Marketing Strategy

Based on our business needs -- which may be informed by marketing -- what actions should we take in the market to better sell our products or services?

This is an aggregate view of tactics that can be taken and their intended reactions in the market at large, concerning long-term brand equity and value as well as short-term sales gains. Most designers want to own this space, as they can predict and control each project that they engage.

3. Tactical Marketing Strategy

What is the approach that governs each individual action that we need to take, and in what channel(s)? This is where we get to do the tangible design work, and reap the rewards of implementing a project properly. Without the proper tactics, you won't have creative that makes an impact.

Over the coming weeks, I'm going to outline a taxonomy of how our creative strategies, as designers, can be properly forged by these three fundamental marketing strategies. I'm also going to outline some baseline rules that can govern what creative strategies you choose, what you outsource to partners, and what you decline to include in your core set of capabilities that you share with your clients.

Continue on to Part 2 >>

The Design Client's Bill of Rights

When do clients get upset? When they expect something common -- such as a swift response to an email -- and you don't write back for a day. Or when you show two concepts when the contract said four. Or, heavens forbid, you show up for a meeting 15 minutes late and don't call them well ahead to warn them.

No matter whether you're flying solo or working within an agency, there are key expectations that every client considers a given: timeliness, transparency, value, and respect.

Read these next paragraphs in the voice of the client that appreciates you most.

The Design Client's Bill of Rights

1. Timeliness

I know when I'm getting deliverables, how long I have to review them, and when I need to pay you for them. Up front, on a schedule, net 30 or 60 -- this must be clear from the start of our engagement.

Additionally, we will keep to scheduled meeting times and you will not be late without warning. I am always exempt from rebuke for tardiness, as I am busy working to ensure your work is approved with your best interests in mind. However, if you're billing me by the hour and my lateness is costing me money, please gently let me know.

Once a schedule is set, your work will never be late, unless an unforeseen circumstance arises and you contact me well in advance of the deadline to ensure that my superiors do not clobber us for the possible appearance of unprofessionalism. If we change the scope of our project, I expect you to negotiate a new schedule with me that allows the work to proceed to the best of your ability without compromising fully our initial time frame.

2. Transparency

I need to know where we're at in the project at any time.

I need to know the thinking behind the work that you show me, the work that I choose, and when necessary the work that I decline. I am your advocate in my corporation/organization and need to be able to own the agency's perspective when I speak before my boss, my CEO, my peers, and the general public. Do not assume that you will be able to participate in every meeting within my company to defend the work.

I need to know the impact my project will have on my customers, my company, and the world at large, not to mention sustainability issues and ethical concerns that may transcend the work and damage our reputations.

3. Value

I am always seeking fairness in agency/designer fees. I will mindfully defer on negotiating minor fee changes if my project has a major, provable impact on brand equity.

That said, my corporation will usually require me to bid work through multiple agencies, so be aware that the cost of your work will always be factored into the overall value of our potential relationship. If you're underbid, that doesn't mean I'll always choose the lower bidder. I will choose the best vendor for the project.

Don't hide costs or penalize me for the lack of forethought in your bidding or my strategic approach. Work with me as a partner to help me understand where we need to meet, both fiscally and professionally, so that both of us win.

If you can't do the work for the costs you estimated, let me off the hook quickly enough to allow me to engage with another vendor before my boss fires me, or bring me options that both of us can live with, being mindful that I may not return to work with you again -- no matter how great the final result can be.

4. Respect

If I smell oversized ego, or if you tell me I just don't get it, then you're history. I'm responsible for my business and have to live with the consequences of your recommendations.

I expect you to convey, through everything that you do for me, the knowledge that you care and respect our shared partnership. We have a relationship that is predicated on our focus on creating meaningful design communications. This can influence everything: how you dress, how you talk, how you describe your work to my boss, how we catch a beer after work and you respect the client/designer boundary. We aren't friends. We are colleagues.

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If you have the ability to do so, you should write up expectations for what your clients should expect of you right as you're hired.

If you can't return an email in two hours, tell them. If you need one to two days flexibility on your project milestones because you're overloaded in your studio, tell them up front. Don't surprise them along the way. If you do, you'll risk diminishing your long-term relationship and chances for success because of something unspoken, unfulfilled, or unwittingly ignored.

Not Just Clients. Thought Partners.

Yesterday I heard words from a new client that made my face light up, as it's the kind of client relationship I think we all truly seek: thought partnership.

If designers want to be seen as agents of change, not mere decorators, we need clients to see us as thinking about their needs outside of the work at hand.

Standing tall as a holistic thinker, you can enter into larger, bolder discussions that will help shape and change more than just their marketing -- you'll change the quality of their business. You'll show them an outsider's perspective on their customers, the community they play in, and their overall corporate strategy and brand. Otherwise, you're just taking orders. Without being a party to the larger discussions happening within your client's organization, you can't begin to originate the kinds of ideas that can create positive change on a large scale for the good of their customers.

That said, don't forget the "partnership" part of your role. Just because you're orbiting the client's hairball (to borrow Gordon MacKenzie's phrase) doesn't mean you get to take pot-shots. A good portion of your designer-client partnership is being cognizant of how your ideas are going to influence their organization. Some ideas you originate and share with the client will change the way they do business. The same goes for you. The client often shares ideas with you that dramatically influence how you do business. It's a two-way street, and many designers forget in the heat of the battle over which concept and what idea that without the client there to support your business, you don't have a business. And without the client being part of the ongoing conversations you're having to help grow their business, then you're just designing things on demand instead of really making a difference.

A Creative Brief Should Be... Brief

See the title of this post.

A brief is digested, in all senses of the word -- a condensation of thought that indicates a clear strategic direction. Killer creative thinking comes from focus. You need a bull's eye to aim at, not a dartboard.

In my experience, there is an inverse correlation between the length of a creative brief and the quality of thought that goes into it. I have fond memories, as I'm sure we all do, of reviewing a brief in abject fear, realizing that the client is requesting work that communicates three or four different ideas within one piece. Many of them can be contradictory.

This is when you need to work with your client to narrow their strategy to the right key message -- one that is easily communicated and makes sound business sense.

The creative process can be easily co-opted for the express purpose of focusing the client's marketing or branding strategy in the work itself. This is a waste of time and money for the client and the designer, and no way to run a profitable business.

Ideally, a brief should never run longer than 2 pages. Everything else is just incidental detail. Do all those facts and figures and charts need to be in the brief? Can you communicate them in another way or provide them as supporting material? When I see a thicket of details in the brief, they are often secondary to the goal of the project. Everyone needs to share the goal before the details can fit.

The real litmus test to a compelling brief is when you polish up your designs, board them, meet your clients in the conference room, and introduce your work by sharing one to two succinct sentences that summarize the entire strategic direction of the project. At this point, their heads should be nodding expectantly, as they wait for you to reveal how you've clothed their business needs in compelling artistry.

The Virtues of Great Creative Managers

Optimism. Patience. Willpower. Flexibility. Lack of Ego. Vision.

Notice I didn't say creative. People with a creative instinct, as opposed to a creative impulse, are the ones that will set you free.

Why would you want a creative manager that isn't creative?

I've had a ton of creative managers that are top of their game in design, copywriting, web development, account management, and even project management. All of them had empathy, intuition, and logic in equal measure, and understood how to look at the work and speak to it in a way that made it sing.

However, the best creative managers I've ever had all shared one characteristic: the ability to properly identify and make use of the creative thinking of their staff. Whenever possible, they don't impose -- they expose. They cede control of details to ensure the big picture is still pleasing when the last few strokes are painted into place.

The First Point of Failure

The brochure cover design and rough layout were easily approved, you've proceeded to layout and typeset beautiful copy written by a freelance writer, €”and the client hates the copy. It's all wrong.

The changes that he described to you over the phone require the writer to create a new draft. Then you'll need to replace the copy through the brochure with a new content structure that requires redesigning the inside completely. And based on the copywriter "missing the mark," which you don't quite agree with, now the client's thinking the overall concept for the cover may need to change as well. And of course, they don't want to pay for the changes outside of your current estimate...

"But I told him that he needed to read and approve the copy before I'd go to full layout. He said he was too busy / on vacation / (insert client excuse here) and that he trusted me / my staff / my freelancer to do great work..."

More often than not, there is always a first point of failure in a project where an issue like this comes to light. It could be a late approval that influences your delivery date, a round of concepts that the client dislikes, or a misjudgment of exactly how many hours you'll need to deliver that killer Flash advertisement.

These points of failure can be traced back to concerns that rest outside the traditional "design process." Failure is an important and inevitable part of the creative process, often leading to truly breakthrough design solutions. But when major failures occur during the business processes of a project, you can get knocked right out of business.

In this above scenario, the first point of failure was the desire to please a client, no matter what the cost. Wearing your account management hat at the expense of your project process can trump the controls you keep in place to ensure that you don't have to work over your time estimate. While it's tempting to mold your progress to your client's availability, there's always a point of diminishing return (and profit) for the graphic designer. This becomes even more risky in a creative agency setting, where thousands of dollars in staff time can go out the window without client approval at key milestones.

Other common points of failure occur when:

• The creative agency or designer isn't able to enforce boundaries around each phase of a design project. This usually emerges from entering into a project outside their area of expertise without having lived through what it would really take to fulfill the job profitably. In smaller projects in print and online, missteps can result in rework and added time and labor. In large-scale web design and video projects, a lack of boundaries can lead to absolute failure and huge costs amassed to start projects over again.
• The client doesn't want to work within the project boundaries. This can happen because the client didn't disclose there were multiple stakeholders within their company that had to approve each round. If the designer or agency doesn't ask the client about the need for multiple rounds of approvals and changes, they may feel uncomfortable penalizing the client by asking for more money. And like above, the client can feel like they are a hinderance if they aren't available during important approval rounds and want to keep the project moving towards an absolute deadline. There's an endless list here of reasons why the client can strain against an agency's process, and if the designer or agency doesn't stand firm, there's usually no going back.
• The client doesn't understand what they're asking for. They may have never handled a project in the discipline they've been asked to manage. The process you've been tasked to take them through baffles them (branding and web design being the usual suspects). Questions about their business strategy, business process, brand positioning, and sales methodology percolate out of your design work and open new areas they haven't grappled with fully. The design brief may become invalid partially through a project and require scrapping progress and starting over--something every client loves to hear.

While these kinds of situations often seem an inevitable part of a designer's life, they can be eased by making sure that you do the following:

• You have properly researched and digested the business problem in the creative brief. And by digested, I mean that you've thought through, validated, and proposed focused solutions for the client's business problem in advance of any design work. Without the proper context and frame around the business problem, your design won't hold as much weight in the client's mind. In advance of writing the brief, you may need the client to fill out an intake questionnaire that fully examines the kinds of things clients may not have thought through (such as brand positioning and sales process methodologies).
• You devise and keep to a workflow during your entire project--and make your client continually aware of the schedule and their ongoing responsibilities. If the client doesn't know they're on the hook and accountable through the entire creative project, you have no authority to make demands when things go sideways, both in pushing schedules out and in asking for more money. On the flip side, if you haven't properly planned your project out and uncover all the unknown variables, you're on the hook if it impacts your bottom line.
• You keep within the boundaries of the proposal. I have fond memories of developing elaborate pitches at big agencies to try and land projects ($20K time investment). Then, when the work actually came in, we'd show five concepts instead of three at the first round, and then produce an extra brochure design or two if we were feeling nice ($5K). Most smaller creative agencies and solo designers can't afford to throw this kind of money out the window, and it trains clients to have expectations of their design firms that exceed the boundaries of profitability and professionalism.

Strangely, the larger the project, the more that the actual process of designing almost seems to be a mere fraction of the work necessary to make clients happy.

What are points of failure you've had in your design projects? What did you discover in the process that made you a better designer and a better businessperson?