Successful brands have always understood the power of branding. Spending a significant amount of time developing their Brand Statements, Brand Promise, and Graphic imagery so consumers will feel confident in what they are buying and why they choose it versus the competitor. [Read more…] about Personal Branding, Part 1
branding
Are you a terrible client?
So, you’ve hired an agency to design you a new website, build your brand, or bring leads in the door.
I can tell you from firsthand experience that both clients and agencies have common complaints about working together. And let me be clear that agencies are not always perfect angels either – they need to take responsibility for their actions.
But most clients will often bring their own baggage, misunderstandings, and lack of experience into the agency relationship and it ends up being very counterproductive.
In short, clients, even those with good intentions, can get in the way of great work and valuable results.
How do you know if you’re a shitty client? Read on and see if any of these practices sound familiar to you:
Hiring an agency the wrong way
Don’t put out a public RFP and invite every agency under the sun to submit.
Most good agencies, the agencies that you want to work with, won’t respond to random RFP’s. The RFP process is usually being evaluated on price alone and they’re not going to waste days of their time putting together a proposal when you’re only interested in a bargain basement price. You’ll just end up getting what you pay for….a cheap-ass project at a bottom-basement price by an inferior agency.
Research a handful of agencies, ask for referrals, and then invite a few agencies to meet to discuss your needs.
Good agencies, the kind that you want to work with, know that a successful business relationship is based on a good fit.
They want to make sure that they can provide the right solution to your challenge, deliver results, and provide good ROI. They also want to know that you’ll all get along in the process.
You should have the same criteria when choosing an agency, but you can’t determine any of those things by emailing out a an 80-page RFP. You need to meet in person, or at the very least, have a phone call.
Don’t hire the cheapest agency.
Yes, hire the agency you can afford, but don’t attempt a bidding war or try to get the best deal in town. Again, you’ll only end up filtering out the best agencies who don’t want to deal with that cheap-ass bullshit.
Don’t ask them to submit speculative work. EVER.
If you haven’t hired an agency, don’t ask them for mockups for websites, logos or some other creative piece. That’s what they get PAID to do. You wouldn’t ask an architect to design you a house, and then based on whether you like the design, decide whether you’re going to pay them for their work.
If you want a sense of the quality of their work, ask to see their portfolio, or case studies and references from other clients.
Do ask for a formal pitch and proposal process.
While RFP’s and speculative work are no-nos, it is appropriate to ask for a proposal and pitch meeting. If the potential agency wants your business, they will happily prepare a proposal, and they’ll want to pitch it to you in person or via zoom.
Don’t just ask for the costs to be emailed to you; it doesn’t work like that. They want to wow you, so let them do that. It’s good for you to get a feel for the people you’ll be working with and be able to ask questions.
Make sure to invite other team members to the pitch
Make sure that you invite key people on your team to the pitch; people who will either end up working with the agency once the project kicks off, or who will be affected by the results.
That way they can ask questions about the agency’s process and expertise, plus they’ll get a feel for what the working relationship might be like. Your co-workers may also be able to provide valuable information to the agency that will help with the project.
After the pitch, thank the agency and tell them when to expect a decision. Make sure you follow through with the date, or at least keep them posted on any delays.
If the agency is in high demand, they may tell YOU when they need to hear a yes or no. Don’t be offended by this; they want to be sure that they can schedule the time to do your work amongst the other client projects they have on the go. It may be they can do your project in the next 4-6 weeks, but they’re booked for three months after that.
Discuss the pitch and proposal with your team members to decide if the agency can deliver what you need and that there’s a cultural fit – you want to enjoy working together. Price is important but not the most important thing — just make sure they articulate your return on investment in a way that makes sense.
Ghosting your agency when they need you
If you expected that once you hired an agency, you could go off on vacation or lose yourself in another project and the work would magically get done without you, you’re sadly mistaken. You’re also going to frustrate the hell out of your agency.
Just like any relationship, both sides need to contribute. They need you, and you need them. You’re in this project together.
To complete the work successfully, your agency may need you to answer questions to shape the direction, give feedback at certain milestones, and provide information for deliverables like copy.
Make yourself available for meetings and phone calls. When your agency sends you work to review, approve it or request changes in a timely fashion.
Here at Straydog, we find that 90% of the time our projects are delayed because the clients are late in providing feedback, approvals, or other resources, like website copy.
You don’t want the project delayed now, do you? Neither does your agency. And you certainly don’t want to be the one responsible for delaying the project.
If you’re too busy to talk to your agency every week or two, or get them what they need to complete the project, then appoint someone in your company to be the main point of contact and give them the autonomy to make decisions.
BUT: if you do choose a co-worker to take the lead as the agency point of contact, don’t come in at the end of the project and change everything, that’s the “Parachuting CEO” scenario. Make sure you’re staying up to date on the progress of the project. Otherwise, you’ll quickly end up on the Top Ten Clients to Hate list. You’ll also incur more expenses for changing the scope or delaying the project.
You’re either in, or you’re out.
Having unrealistic expectations
We often find that clients so often have unrealistic expectations when working with us.
What kinds of expectations are unrealistic, you ask?
You aren’t their only client
Like most good agencies, Straydog has multiple projects on the go at once. We’re not sitting idly by the phone waiting to hear from you. You also haven’t paid us enough to be the ONLY project we’re working on.
Clients often want work turned around in very short, and unrealistic schedules – expecting months of work to be launched in a week. But we have other deadlines to meet, other work to do. It’s an agency’s objective to meet deadlines they’ve committed to you, but you can’t expect us or any other agency to drop everything to only work on your project. There’s a reality to how long it takes to complete certain deliverables, and if you want quality results, that takes time.
Don’t make your agency a scapegoat
Clients are notorious for blaming their agency when bad things happen, things beyond the agency’s control.
Your website got hacked? Sales are down after a market crash? Software the agency recommended had a bug or experienced some downtime? It’s not their fault. That’s like if a flood happened at the hotel you booked for a corporate event ends up ruining your product launch, and then you blamed the person who booked the venue.
Shit happens, and sometimes that shit is outside of your agency’s control. Stay calm, ask them to do whatever is in their power to fix it, but don’t blame them.
Thinking you can do their work for them
Having an agency is like having a dance partner. If you want to get the best work from them, you need to let them lead. Don’t step on their toes.
Remember why you hired them – you needed help. You need outside expertise and resources and even if you think you can do better, you don’t have the time. If you know better, why did you hire an agency to start with?
That doesn’t mean you don’t have valuable ideas or opinions to contribute to the project, but you need to respect the agency’s expertise enough to let them do what they’re good at. Let them do their job. You wouldn’t tell a plumber how to plumb your house, or a mechanic how to fix your car. So don’t tell a designer how to design a website, or there will be a murder.
Design is not just an end result. It’s a process that involves discussing problems, coming up with ideas for solutions, talking to end users and testing prototypes. That’s how they get to the beautiful result, your project.
There’s nothing creative people hate more than being handed a paint-by-numbers worksheet. They want to find the solution, not have it handed to them. And frankly, that’s what you’re paying them for!
Accept that you aren’t going to have all the answers at the beginning, and that’s OK. Don’t come to your agency with solutions — come with challenges. Your agency won’t think you’re dumb. That’s what they’re here for. That’s their business.
The only other time you get to sit around and complain about your problems is with a therapist, so just enjoy this.
Having crappy taste and offering subjective feedback
Part of hiring a creative agency usually involves a creative deliverable, and guess what? You’re not always going to like what you see.
That doesn’t mean they suck. It doesn’t mean you hired the wrong agency and need to find a new one. It means you don’t like it.
Great design doesn’t happen in one go – it usually takes feedback, further dicussions and iterations to really knock it out of the park. So don’t flip out if you don’t like the first version.
Here’s a mental process you should follow to review and critique creative. Ask yourself:
Does this align with the strategy you’ve already approved?
If the strategy was to highlight a particular feature of your product or facet of your brand and the creative does just that, then it’s on strategy.
So if the work is true to the creative brief you approved, but you now realize you screwed up and approved the wrong strategy, then say so. Your agency will have to redo the work, which means it’s going to cost more and take longer. But that’s your fault not having your shit together, not theirs.
Is your personal taste interfering with good work?
The fact you don’t like the red doesn’t make the creative off strategy; it just means you don’t like red. This isn’t a car you’re going to be driving around everyday, it’s a creative solution designed to get you business results. It’s targeted at your customers, not you.
Don’t ask your mother or the next-door neighbour for their feedback on the agency’s work. These people are not experts, they don’t know anything about your project and probably even know less about good design. Trust the process, TRUST YOUR AGENCY.
Feel free to ask the designer why they made certain choices, but listen to their rationale as objectively as possible. If you don’t agree with their decisions on an objective level, tell them.
Does the work make you slightly uncomfortable?
If so, then it’s probably going in exactly the right direction. Do you know why the majority of ads suck and aren’t memorable? Because the agency gave the client what made them feel comfortable. Safe. Passive. Forgettable.
The market doesn’t care how you feel.
Work that stands out is raw, funny, authentic, transparent, and sometimes pushes the envelope. It takes a stand for something. It says something not everyone agrees with. It alienates some people.
So if you feel a tightness in your chest about the work, that’s you feeling something. And if YOU feel something, your target audience just might feel something too. When you can elicit a positive emotional response from your target audience, then it’s time to hand your agency a bottle of champagne because they did their fucking job.
I’m not saying this doesn’t backfire sometimes. When you make yourself stand out, you can offend certain people and this can cause a public relations issue. Use good judgement, but don’t let yourself become such a slave to pleasing everyone that in the end, you please no one, not even your own bottom line.
Being an unforgiving asshole
Before you go above your account person’s head to complain to the owners or decide to fire the agency altogether, give them time to correct the situation.
Agencies want to do good work, and you should expect good work. But you should also expect that shit happens sometimes. It’s not necessarily the end of the world, or the end of your project.
Not paying invoices on time
There’s almost nothing worse than a client who doesn’t pay their invoices on time.
Agencies run businesses with narrow margins, long sales cycles, and a lot of clients who wait until as long as possible to pay. Yes, that’s the nature of the business, but contributing to the problem won’t help you either. In lots of agencies, clients who are consistently slow to pay their invoices are dropped way down the priority line when it comes to completing work.
Just pay your damn bills on time.
Conclusion
I’m really not trying to paint all clients with the same asshole paint brush. But if you ask 1,000 agencies about their biggest frustrations with clients, I guarantee all of of these points will come up almost 100% of the time.
I don’t think you were born an asshole client. You just have no idea what you’re doing. And by not knowing what you’re doing, you’re ruining your chances of getting awesome work that will deliver awesome results.
The Press Room Opens!
Straydog’s branded The Press Room, opens in Vancouver in mid December in Olympic Village, at 1778 Columbia Street.
Pop-in, have a coffee, stay awhile and say hi to the proud owners, Selena Wang and Toby Xiang!
Creating Brand Advocates
Brands love having celebrities and social media gurus in their corner, but it’s the everyday fans and customers who ultimately make or break a brand.
Creating brand advocates should be a significant part of your social media efforts. Every brand wants large numbers of followers and fans promoting them on social channels, but few companies are willing to get out of their own way and do what it takes to gain true advocacy.
It’s about developing relationships. Continually, companies build elaborate social profiles and develop advertising campaigns with the hopes of gaining more fans. We often see this with companies that simply do not have a social media strategy… and then they wonder why no one spreads the word about their brand.
What does it take to turn followers of your brand into advocates?
It’s about getting personal and reaching people.
First of all you should gain an understanding of why people should care about your company or product, stand up for you or share their experiences. To figure this out, turn it around and ask yourself the same question about brands you like; the ones you tell your friends about. You will likely think; it was a good product, your like what they stand for, they treated you well and were responsive to your needs.
Most marketers are focused on trying to assign a dollar value to each Facebook fan or Twitter follower instead of paying attention to the fact that, without the brand engagement and interaction that takes place in these mediums, the value of each user is greatly diminished. With a precise Social media strategy of what you exactly want to achieve, combined with the knowledge around personal brand connection, customers will indeed buy more and promote your brand.
Building advocacy means offering something more compelling than a nice Facebook page or Twitter profile. When your customers find you via social, they’re looking for an opportunity to build an emotional connection.
How to encourage brand emotion
Respond promptly to messages or customer feedback, make an effort to reach out and thank individuals for sharing your content, be transparent and appreciate your customers. Like any friendship, brand advocacy is not a numbers game, it’s the natural byproduct of developing good relationships, providing great consistent service, and delivering on your brand promise. Give your audience an experience that stands out, don’t be too routine and stand out from the competition! Make it a part of your culture and brand DNA to be social and engaging.
When you have found your brand advocates, make sure they’re heard. Brand advocates deserve to be recognized.
Here is an infographic about brand advocacy:
10 Reasons For a Brand Reposition
The term “brand” represents your business values, history, personality and direction. It’s a statement as to who you are and what you stand for. As times changes so will your business, the brand and the image it projects.
What is involved in Re-Branding?
For corporate companies, it’s a strategic action in which they will partner in research with a design firm to determine what elements require changing or refreshing.
How do you know when you need a re-brand?
The changes in your business may be difficult to pinpoint, but are typically specific to your business model and you may not have even realized the changes that took place.
Sum up everything that has changed about your business from the processes, target market, sales strategies to the way you’re now perceived. Look at it in a time line, what’s changed within a year, anything significant or an accumulation of small changes — A number of small changes can be just as strong as a large change!
- A need to increase relevance to the consumer.
- Your brand has a confusing or nonexistent image.
- You are broadening your brand to appeal to additional consumers.
- The primary benefit your brand “owns” has evolved from a differentiating benefit to a cost-of-entry benefit.
- Your business is significantly altering its strategic direction.
- A new competitor with a superior value proposition enters your industry.
- The tone of the brand does not speak to the target market.
- Your business has acquired a proprietary advantage that must be worked into the brand positioning.
- Corporate culture renewal dictates at least a revision of the brand personality.
- The brand looks and feels dated and/or its technology has evolved and is not represented.
Learn More about Straydog’s Vancouver Branding Studio [+]
Branding Misconceptions
Often times when discussing creative needs with clients, common misconceptions about branding come into play.
It is vital that you understand the importance, value, and return associated with a solid brand, or you’re never going to tap the power of branding and its full potential. Here is a list of the Top 6 misconceptions when it comes to branding.
Misconception #1: Brand is a logo
Yes, logos are a significant part of the Brand Identity, and can say a lot about the character of a company and its offering. But a brand is more complex than a logo, it is the perception in the mind of the consumer, it is the personality and values of a company, and it is a gut feeling.
I’ve already got a brand, I did the logo myself”…Good for you! But a logo is not a brand.
…You should be concerned if all you have is a logo. It’s rare that you can encompass all aspects of your brand into your logo, so you want to make sure you are utilizing other branding elements to support and carry your brand message. Your brand is formulated by the many interactions consumers have with your communications, staff, products and services. Therefore, your brand must project consistently in every aspect of your marketing, PR, and all other touch points.
Misconception #2: Brands are only successful with a big advertising budget.
You might have thought you were limited in your efforts to build your brand because you
can’t afford TV commercials and billboards, but think again. Not only is advertising ineffective without a strong brand foundation, there is far more value in the messaging and its consistency. Brands are not successful by a big marketing budget.
“We just don’t have the marketing budget right now.”
…You have your priorities reversed.
…Your brand strategy and branding initiatives shouldn’t be dependent on your marketing – your marketing should be dependent on your overall brand strategy
Misconception #3: Brands are there to influence consumers
Small businesses grow because of relationship building and consistency. Your product or service is only part of the brand, and it’s not the only reason why customers choose you. It’s really about who you are as a person, a corporation, or a team. Trust and transparency is an integral part of your brand’s success and it’s what will influence customers to become loyal.
When you and your brand are functioning as an energized and cohesive unit, focused on the brand promise and values, you will see a significant shift in your customer and their purchase habits. Building your brand from the inside out will ensure you the greatest returns when your brand reaches the outside.
Misconception #4: Brands are the responsibility of the marketing department
If a brand is not understood and revisited by all members of the organization, brand’s can often create false promises. Products and services must deliver on their brand promise, and it’s the role of every staff member to deliver the message consistently.
It’s the company’s responsibility to educate employees of the brand and make sure they have the tools to protect and enhance a brand’s strength. Delivering on the brand’s promises requires the involvement of virtually every employee in all areas of the organization, even those who have no direct customer contact.
Misconception #5: Consumers don’t really care what the brand looks like
Some industries are less glamorous than others, and some business owners may claim that they don’t need to work on the brand because their market doesn’t really care. Well, audiences are much more intuitive than many business owners perceive. No matter what brand the consumer is buying, they still desire products and services that they are attracted to and that they can connect with.
A brand is an expression of the company, so if the company makes quality products and the brand doesn’t convey the same level of quality, there will be an inevitable lack of confidence.
Misconception #6: Professional Branding services are only for large businesses
Creative design studio’s come in all shapes and sizes, and regardless of scale, smaller companies should not be intimidated by approaching a larger branding agency. Design agencies may offer a sliding scale of services that still fits within your budget. They may also be open to gaining experience in a new industry or building on a specific part of their portfolio.
On the flip side, larger companies should not rule out smaller agencies who also offer quality work and may even have a faster turn around time due to a more flexible business model. The most important thing to remember is that branding is a vital investment in the long-term success of your business, and it should be developed with a strategic and professional design agency.
Summary
When you understand that your brand is made up of all of the touch points your stakeholders experience both on the inside and out, you’ll see that doing all the things you do every day consistently with an understanding of your brand will efficiently build what people think of you.