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The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 6

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Now that we've worked through some of the key approaches to formulating business, marketing, and tactical strategies for your clients -- and how those form the frame around your creative strategy -- I thought it would be valuable to include a few points about how to distill your marketing insights into compelling creative communications.

Think outside the box, but inside the strategy.

As a designer, there's nothing I love more than launching into space after reading a creative brief, brainstorming solutions for the client's needs. But that brainstorm should never go off into deep space, never to return. I know it's bad etiquette to edit during brainstorms, so I try to let every idea have its due... at first. But when you're culling those ideas down to what will become solid concepts to put in front of the client, you have to be ruthless. Anything that doesn't fit the strategy and the key insight the client approved in the brief, or modifies that insight into something completely fresh and new, needs to be placed in the parking lot and saved for future use. (Unless your brief was wrong in the first place, which means you should back up a few paces and make sure you landed the right insight to back up your creative work.)

Firmly fix your concepts on a properly told story.

You know they want your vacuum cleaner because it has a sexy design, it lives at a slightly lower price point than the competition, and the HEPA filter makes it easy to clean up dog hair. Yawn. Don't tell me the details. Show me how it's going to change my life. Find a story that communicates this seed feeling to me. Then hammer on it mercilessly. Again, if you don't have a story that matches your key insight, you need to step back and rethink where you're at.

Don't move away from a key insight or position too quickly. You might piss off your clients and your audience.

As you develop creative concepts in a series, don't be too hasty to bring in something new. There's a major piss-off factor that happens when you iterate insights about your brand too quickly. It usually just means that you landed on the wrong insight, which is a kind of weakness that consumers can smell on the wind.

You won't lose a client because your key insight over a year or two doesn't continue to hold. Audience behavior shifts over time, based on a number of factors that corporations and designers can't easily control. But you will lose a client straight out of the gate if your key insight fails to hold up. It means that the foundations of your house were faulty to begin with, and somewhere along the way, due diligence wasn't exercised. So be sure that if you are going to make a client recommendation, the tires have been kicked enough times that you don't have to fear running out of air as you pull onto the highway.

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Now that you understand your client's business logic, their overall marketing needs, and what tactics you're going to employ based on your audience behavior, you're ready to create properly positioned creative concepts. At this point, it may seem like your work is going to be bulletproof, but we're only halfway home. You've got to execute an effective piece of marketing communications! Thankfully, that's the lion's share of what we get paid for, and in many ways, what we'll always need to do best to retain our clients.

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 5

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

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. Let's talk about how you apply your marketing strategy and your audience insights to generate tactics that sing.

Based on how you answered your top three questions in Part 4 of this series, you have the answers that you need to select your tactics. So, let's flip those questions around and use them as the proper guide to discuss the thinking that should help shape your tactical marketing approach.

Tell your audience what they want to hear, based on how they feel.

You've determined some key understandings about your audience base. Now distill that material into one key insight that will make them pay attention. Ideally, you have to be able to say this in one sentence (or less) to succeed in selling your client and your shareholders.

In the realm of financial services, think about MasterCard: "Priceless." Or Citi: "Live Richly." Or way back when Washington Mutual knew what they were doing: "More Human Interest." Each of those key insights was an embodiment of how they understood their audience needs. They are all ways of making a dull, droll, somewhat cutthroat industry foster a human connection with their audience. (Reading that previous sentence over again, I'm sounding pretty jaded.)

I'm not saying you always need to come up with some catchy phrase for your client. You just need to know what human insight drives your tactics. Some clients can hand the appropriate insight to you on a platter, and save you plenty of work. If you have a less sophisticated client, or you're being hired to generate this insight, you will need to include this key insight in the brief, or you're taking a big risk.

Talk to your audience where they'll pay the most attention.

Once you have the insight nailed, you go back to your research about where your audience lives and breathes.

If they're business travelers, you could hit them in the taxi, in the airport, on business television, on those little coffee cup sleeves.

If they're consumers, you may recommend redesigning their packaging based on behavioral research and focus groups.

If your audience likes to spend a ton of time online, you could develop a seeding strategy for bloggers, fostering two-way communication between your corporation and your customer base.

Of course, all of these thoughts will dovetail with previous efforts your client has made, and the statistics about how they have performed.

In the good old days, we used to talk about "above the line" communications (a.k.a. television, print, and other high-profile awareness-generating mediums) and "below the line communications" (direct mail, in-store sales, training, anything focused on fostering sales). Nowadays, there is no line. Since we're talking about fostering great customer experiences that lead to long-term relationships with brands, every single customer interaction could lead to a positive or negative impression of a company and its products and services. If a client comes to you saying they want to sell 100,000 more bags of chips a month, you can't just say to run some ads and call it a day. Your approach needs to be multilayered and more sophisticated, taking into account both traditional one-way media communications (such as advertising, collateral, branding) and two-way media communications (such as compelling interactive, social networking, blogging, thought leadership, in-person dialogue).

So while it's easy to tell a company that they need to get in front of 1 million eyeballs to generate 10,000 sales, it's not the appropriate answer anymore. I can't imagine walking into a client's office and advocating that kind of solution without being roundly laughed at. As consumers, we expect dialogue with brands. We know we're in control of the game and have a real voice in the marketplace. Online, your voice can carry just as much weight as 100,000 impressions of a banner advertisement, or more.

Assume the audience won't hear it the first time. Or the second. Or...

Another attribute of your audience research should be focused on how you can craft your communication strategy to surround the right people at the right point in the sales process with the right message. It's no longer "one size fits all" communications that can accomplish every single goal with one swing of the hammer. Be smart about how each touch fosters progress through your sales process, while at the same time, being aware that your customers may only get message 2, 4, and 7 out of your grand media scheme -- meaning that each creative communication should always hit home the key insight and provide some of the support necessary to foster the right kind of experience and prompt some level of future interaction.

Test, test, test. And then test some more.

Return on investment should dictate every move you make in the marketplace. Don't ever put a tactic on the table, such as a long run of television spots, or a grandiose series of online ads, without factoring iteration and improvement into the process. Due to up-to-the-second metrics on interactive properties, clients expect adjustment on the fly. And be prepared to kill a buy midstream or shift media or money to other channels if they don't perform at the right cost per acquisition. Unless your goals include some measure of thought leadership or more favored brand presence, don't think about pouring more cash into "love bombs" or other forms of sheer goodwill without the research to back up the long-term ramifications of your actions.

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In the final part of this series, I'll share some broad guidelines to help your marketing insights take the appropriate form in compelling marketing communications.

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 4

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

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. In this post, I'm going to detail the key questions that comprise the guts of a high-level marketing strategy and the seeds of both your creative strategy and marketing tactics.

Marketing Strategy at a Glance

Based on our business needs, what actions should we take in the market to better sell our products or services? From the corporation's point of view, this often boils down to bottom-line impact, moving the needle by a point or two. For designers, this business need must be clothed in a human insight to have any lasting effect on the market.

When embarking on a marketing plan, the following questions need to be addressed and always in this order. Otherwise, you're throwing tactics at the wall like spaghetti.

1. What does the audience want to hear from this company? Is what the company wants also what the audience wants? Before you can propose a strategy, you need to know that the audience is receptive to such messaging. And if they aren't, you need to come back to the client with solid research to indicate the direction they should take.

2. Where does the audience want to hear it? Where does the audience live, breathe, and communicate? Where they live, work, and seek distraction, as well as online destinations where they congregate -- and how much time they spend in those different locations -- are all fair game.

3. What customer problem does this approach solve? Where's the real customer pain you're addressing? If you're creating a pain and then solving it for a customer, then you're going to have a harder row than stepping into your audience's view with something fresh that fulfills a tangible need.

It's important to note that these questions are the core of both your marketing plan and your creative brief. And often all the answers can be found through informal research.

The Importance of (In)Formal Behavioral Research

The questions above can be answered in a number of ways, but most often it requires some level of research. And by research, I'm not talking about 50,000 surveys and heavy focus groups over a period of months around the United States. I'm describing observing your audience in their domain, either through spending some time where they congregate, or doing some anthropology by easing your way into their work environment to gauge how things appear from their point of view. This can be accomplished by engaging with a formal research partner, but in the case of most projects, there isn't time or budget to do so.

So, in lieu of hiring a professional, I do the following.

Spend time in retail environments with the customers. I go out to stores where my client's products are sold and watch every little detail: how people make choices between multiple products, what they may say aloud, whether they interact with salespeople and the quality of their interactions. Designers nowadays are asked to address the overall experience of engaging with a brand, and the sum of these interactions can often give an indication for why people aren't acting in a manner that the corporation would like. The audience is always in control. My rule of thumb is that if I see a behavior repeated 4 to 5 times across multiple stores, it's probably an indication of a much larger concern -- especially if those behaviors are happening across multiple geographies.

Spend time watching how your customers behave online, and if they complain about their on- and off-line experiences. If you can get metrics from your client, combine them with how customers are reacting on wikis, blogs, forums, Facebook, and Twitter. Marry up trends in your Web site statistics, such as fall-off in transactional processes, with real quotes about actual problems that can be solved. Treat every complaint like gold from heaven. If your customers aren't complaining, they probably aren't giving you strong insights.

Do a task analysis. Task analysis allows you to step into the environment of your key audience members and observe how their specific needs can be fulfilled by a the features of a product or service. Ideally, you'd work this kind of research into your agency fee, and a task analysis can help bolster and refine your general behavioral research while also contributing to the development of, say, a complex Web system.

Listen very closely to the client's point of view about their audience. I always read the client's provided research and mine it for insight before going into the world to validate. Even if your client provides you with all the answers, I think it's our responsibility to see if there are any areas in the margin that we can scribble in a little more insight. Designers are intuitive thinkers that can sense the emotional undercurrent of a person's dialogue about, say, a bar of soap. Teasing out those details provide the shape of how our audience is behaving at this moment in time, and what they expect out of any kind of corporate communication. Sometimes your audience is moving so quickly that how they felt six months ago isn't an accurate snapshot of where they are now -- and where they are headed tomorrow.

The following is a gut check that I always apply at the end of research.

See what can and can't be controlled in the sales process. Ever been asked to sell more product when the product really isn't very good, or when you can't control the customer's experience in the store? When doing research, you need to be aware of what you can actually accomplish. You may need to share with the client that their goals are unreasonable, and propose a sturdier, more realistic course of action.

Until They Pay, Keep Your Research Close to Your Chest

Keep in mind that working through this kind of research, especially before you've been paid a fee, is something that you should parcel out to the client very carefully. Depending on the scale of the project, this kind of research and analysis can take a good number of days, and time is money for any design professional.

I recommend that you determine the depth of your research in advance of agreeing to respond to the client proposal or request, and try to keep it to a budget. When I aim for a major piece of business, I dive hard into the research and try to come up with a strong insight before determining any course of action. If the project is at a much smaller scale, those insights may have to wait until they've signed the work order and we've started in on the creative brief.

Once you've collected this information, and you have distilled it into the key themes or trends that indicate a strong support to the business problem, you're ready to talk about marketing tactics, which will follow in our next installment.

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?

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Future posts in this series will talk about how to leap from the business problem to your creative solution through marketing strategy and tactics.

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.

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.

While You're At It, Microsoft, Buy Quark

There's been two metric tons of press regarding the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo merger -- henceforth referred to as Microhoo -- so I won't mention it here again... much. But while Microsoft's throwing about vast piles of cash for non-complementary technology that bolsters its market share by reducing choice, why don't they integrate their Expression Suite with the once-mighty QuarkXPress?

As long as Google owns search, they own the Internet. So why not focus on the low-hanging fruit in other markets?

Since the Great Quark Migration of 2003, the customer base and global support for the Quark organization and its suite of page-layout products have been bleeding away like water out of a punctured balloon. In America, especially, the major reductions in customer support and the decline of a rabid, thoughtful user base have completely cannibalized their market capitalization.

Ten years ago, when InDesign was a twinkle in Adobe's eye, this wasn't an issue. If you told me that a program was going to come along and take me out of Quark 3.1, I was going to say, "No, never! This program is amazing!" Of course, today I say the same thing about Adobe CS3. The tables turned so swiftly due to Quark's extraordinarily slow development cycle and lack of clean integration with Adobe's core product set. Add a very high cost of upgrading -- both in terms of time and money -- and people leapt for a program that was bundled with the indispensable Photoshop and Illustrator.

The only hurdle standing in Microsoft's way? That Quark's file foundation is in the Postscript language, licensed from Adobe, Microsoft's arch-nemesis. To that I say: So what? Strip out Quark's web development tools, whose functionality are a mere shadow of what is necessary to pull off an enterprise-level site. Fork over the necessary moolah to Adobe to keep the program running. Discover ways to extend Quark's core functionality into integrating and translating Postscript to XAML and back.

Until Microhoo squares off against the Googlenet, this seems like a surefire way to keep the troops busy and integrate a pretty good product into their design software portfolio. We shall keep our eyes peeled if it comes to pass.

And remember, Microsoft: you always have the option of buying Corel, too...

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 Designer as an Agent of Change

The future of design is not design. The future of design is embracing change.

To take it further: I see design's real opportunity in this coming decade is to step up and acknowledge that design has always been an agent of change. It just took this long for interactive, as a communication medium, to mature enough to make that change visible to the eye.

There. I said it. And while we're at it...

Down with the tyranny of the professional designer! Down with their superiority complex in the face of a world full of 1 billion dreadfully designed web pages! Down with their PMS swatch books, organized by hue on their desks! Down with their eloquent pronounciation of obscure typeface names from minute foundries run by hotshot typographers in their late twenties who insist on spending at least a year on each Bodoni revival to ensure its legibility at 4 points!

I could go on, but I think you get the point. (And the sarcasm. I'm still working on my Bodoni revival as well...)

Design is a professional practice and a business discipline. It requires an enormous breadth of knowledge in aesthetics and an gigantic amount of thought to fulfill well. It requires an awareness of psychology and visual poetry. It thrives off foresight and insight as well as the willpower necessary to weather the stormy seas that come with large, challenging projects. That's all apparent to us, there on the front lines.

We've developed a fairly exclusive lingo and professional language to talk about design. However, the tools that we use are becoming increasingly democratic. We can't rest on our Photoshop and our Illustrator skillz anymore. Our discipline needs to evolve out of our tools and into the effect of our thinking.

In twenty years, I expect that most people will have on their desktop computer the kind of affordable access to the tools necessary to render, print, publish, upload, or animate the necessary materials to do good design work without a professional designer at arm's reach. Eventually, the so-called ivory tower where design theory is housed will be rocked by its inability to function in a business context. And hasn't this always been the struggle?

I've worked at too many agencies where students straight out of school come into meetings with extraordinary ideas and compelling thinking that have no relationship whatsoever to the business problems at hand. I was one of those kids at one point (though I got an English degree with a focus in design and art history, not a design BFA), and I have fond memories of being doe-eyed in the midst of a crew of hunters busy polishing their guns before they set off to find some conceptual game to take down, slaughter, and present -- freshly cooked in layout stew -- to their hungry clients.

Design school today, in my mind's eye, is a tall building manufactured in the Bauhaus period, with perfectly placed windows that conform to a densely spaced grid, creating a pleasing sense of order. Within said building, each room is bursting with all sorts of ideas, pictures, words, images, and theories just yearning to shake the world to its bones. Some of my happiest days I was knee deep in collage clippings, huffing rubber cement, designing typefaces made of fruit I photocopied and hand-colored lovingly on posterboard.

Then reality happens. We intern and apprentice and learn the ropes and that idealism gets smacked out of us by reality. Business meetings happen. Clients ask us what we do. We have to codify what we do, put ourselves in a box, show the power of design in the work but be professional in the interim. We stumble over how to sell ourselves without sounding too visionary:

We solve business problems. We're passionate. We create implementations of ideas. We create influence, belief, understanding, results. We have a proprietary process. We ensures your success. We inspire decisions. We change behavior. Anyone can come up with an idea -- we just come up with better ideas. We create compelling brands. Brand experiences. Brand propositions. Meaningful brands. Increase brand value. We create meaningful experiences. Design can be a powerful force of change.

Does any of this sound familiar? I just went and looked at some agency websites and typed in phrases that I saw on their "About Us" pages. We're specialists in differentiation, right? Then why do our descriptions of what we do say the same thing, over and over and over again?

It seems like we always latch onto the most recent buzzwords and trends (experiential branding! Web 2.0!) instead of looking inward, at what design really excels at in a business context. It's not creating influence or belief or understanding. It's creating change. It always boils down to change. None of this wussy "design can be a powerful force of change" that I saw on a leading design firm's Web site. Design is the force of change. We can own it, today. Interactive has the ability to spread ideas like a gasoline leak that's caught fire. With social media in play, it only takes hours, if not minutes, to get a meme rolling. We can watch the bloom of it, organically -- observe the change happening in real time. The old guard still doesn't quite understand this, but when they do, we're so in business. Whole battles of opinion will play out like watching the Wimbledon tournament compressed into two minutes flat.

I have fond memories of the early to mid-90s, when it became standard business practice for businesses to realize that they absolutely needed a Web site. Your design firm would declare a competency in Web design and people would beat down your door to give you their business. I worked at agencies where we had no portfolio in Web site design and clients would be practically throwing projects at us. On the fly, we'd be creating code and learning Flash and generally falling all over the place, trying to learn what the heck we were doing. We were all tyros. There wasn't much need to differentiate ourselves. We were all in it together.

Accelerate. Five years later, everyone knows the technology. Now the best thinking wins the work. You fall out of the game or you try harder.

Another few years pass, along with a number of influential publications on the 360-degree brand. Experiential branding becomes the rage (agencies love it because it makes it easier to sell more services bundled within one company). Then social media/Web 2.0 strikes the market like a meteor. Oh wait, now we don't just sell ideas... we need to prove that we know how to speak to people online, in the car, on billboards, in the bathroom, in direct mail. The traditional communications disciplines of sales, marketing, public relations, etc. are converging on themselves like a reversal of the big bang.

This trend is not going to stop, as interactive has become the big bad beast that's overwhelmed all other disciplines. It will become the hub of the wheel, and all other disciplines will become the spokes radiating from it.

This puts us in a new space with our clients. In the past, clients came to us understanding what they wanted to change, and we would use design to try to make that happen. As we continue to mature design as a discipline, bolstering it with our learnings in research, anthropology, economics, psychology, sociology, and so on, companies will retain us to promote change separate of projects.

We will manage the brand experience, come up with tactical ideas and strategies to ensure their sales numbers were met, but first and foremost, we will be agents of change. Awareness, understanding, belief, action, reaction, sales, all rolled into one. We will not answer RFPs for tactical campaign work. We will be hired across all disciplines (not just advertising and traditional marketing) to effect change enterprise-wide across organizations. We will speak up regarding business process, customer service, inter-office dynamics -- you name it, it influences the brand, so it falls within our domain. Tactical marketing will always be in our arsenal but we'll be digging way deeper into our toolbox than sending out postcards.

I don't imagine this like the current retainer relationships major agencies have as agency of record. We would be tasked to serve the customer first and the company second -- since, if you think about it, the customer owns the company anyways.

We will differentiate ourselves from the dilettantes and homebodies because we will be bringing value to our client relationships as mavens of change. We will differentiate our agencies by creating our own methods of fostering change. There isn't just one way to do it right. The market will always prove that out.

We will have evolved our discipline enough to be trusted to take initiative when necessary. Ideally, we will function within companies as in-house groups and orbiting consultancies that provide the drive necessary to keep business growth happening (looking good to shareholders) and creating meaningful relationships with customers (fostering the love of customers).

Are designers really equipped to take on this challenge? No way. We will likely have to huddle together and gain the resources to pay it off in the long term. This is consistent with every other growth spurt in the design community -- we seem to hoover up whatever we need from any other discipline when it suits our needs. But the large agencies will get there quickly and stand on the vanguard until we all catch up. Our agency staff won't be designers and production artists and developers and account people. Start seeing a huge diversity of people that you'd never think would pass through the halls of a creative agency.

In ten years, we won't discover we're out of work because of 50DollarLogos.com. We'll be busy as hell. It's just that we won't be creating logos and websites and videos. We'll be creating change. We will be hired to be agents of change. The logos just happen as a result of that.

And I can't wait for that day to arrive.

Good Marketing is Business Psychotherapy

"Finding a new creative agency can be like finding a new therapist. Why would you want to tell your story all over again to a new agency?"

One of my esteemed colleagues, Kara Costa, said the above quote in a meeting about how agencies are marketed. And she's completely right.

At agencies, we listen to our clients very closely. We provide them proper perspective. We unravel existing stories about their products, their brands, and how their companies functions. We help them forge new stories about themselves founded on the truths inherent in their brands. If things are dire, we write a prescription and make sure it gets filled.

As a result, client relationships improve with their customers. The agency, the company, and their audience relate on a deeper, more human level. Often, great marketing and strategic work from an agency can have an impact on how the company functions as a complete organism, making it healthier beyond the immediate deliverables at hand. A strong agency-client relationship can elevate an agency to be the company's therapist, easing them into the necessary efforts to create positive change.

There's a cost, though. Obtaining great design work can require as much introspection and effort as therapy. There is an emotional investment from both parties that creates a strong bond -- or painful friction, if the process isn't managed well.

Of course, friction is an essential part of any marketing work. A good therapist will challenge you in both direct and indirect ways, working to discern the best method to bring out your true nature. Without friction, there isn't change or growth. A good therapist won't just come out and say, "You should do this or you'll be sorry." They help bring you to an understanding contained within your own story.

And just like therapists, it can often seem like designers are only making observations about things already inherent in the client. This isn't devaluing the designer's role, only underscoring the intuitive nature of the designer and the quality of their insight. That's what we get paid for: active listening and reactive envisioning.

It's precisely for this reason that when strong client contacts depart for other companies, they have a predisposition to maintain their preferred agency relationships. I feel like this is part of the reason that agencies are constantly buffeted by the storms of agency reviews. People want to work with agencies that have a proven track record of listening closely to their needs.

You don't go to see a therapist for a few months, thank them for the hard work and effort, and then move on to start all over again. Wouldn't you hate it if you looked up and saw that your therapist was asleep while you were talking to him? Or that he didn't remember that in the third grade, you were taunted by your peers, which led you to lock yourself in the bathroom for a week and cry?

A ten-year client relationship, serviced by consistently excellent work, can evaporate in mere months without the shared experience that comes from working through business problems over time. That experience is the bedrock that keeps the relationship strong through turbulent business conditions. Companies don't get a chance to settle down into a comfortable, challenging relationship when people are flying in and out of their account. Without institutional memory, usually in the form of people and processes, trust evaporates.

What would happen if you treated all of your clients more like a therapist would: with deep respect, compassion, and focused attention on listening to exactly what their needs are. Would that give you the necessary edge to retain them?