ICMI: What to Expect When You’re Expecting

What Could Go Wrong, and How to Deal with Things when They Go Off the Rails; an attempt at an honest reflection of what it means to creatively collaborate.

We’re currently going through the painful/necessary steps of reviewing our (Love and Money’s) own brand messaging, tone of voice and pitch documentation. Painful and necessary because up until now, I’ve done (or very heavily influenced) most of this myself. And the further I step back from the business, the less in touch I am with how this messaging is landing. I’m breaking the feedback loop — however implicit or explicit it might be. By depriving myself, my team and the business of that feedback, I starve us all of the ability to learn, to iterate, and to grow. Which puts LaM in danger of being theoretical, navel-gazey, and obtuse. It’s humbling stuff.

As part of the process, Adnaan went back into some of the stuff we used to publish — some of the stuff that attracted him to our organisation all those years ago, in fact. And he surfaced this: a reflection on the ups and downs of collaborating on a creative project with an agency. I enjoyed the read, and thought maybe ya’ll would too. I’ve made only the most minor of edits.

You ever read the “About Us” page of any digital marketing/branding/design agency ever? It really is as bad as you think it is. 

Via McSweeny’s, forever ago

For years we’ve struggled to get a clear, compelling, bullshit-free version of what we do/how we do it out into the world. Over those years we’ve looked at hundreds (if not thousands) of sites across the world to see if there was any way to strike the balance between clever and vague, between proprietary and explanatory, between ambitious and pretentious. 

For years and years we failed. As Popper says:

“Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.”

―Karl Popper

And it got me thinking: what do people really want to read when they read these things? That you work with clients, not for clients? That you believe in unearthing deep insights that drive outcomes and have a tangible impact on the bottom line? That you’re a changemaker or a firestarter? 

Probably not, no. 

I think what they want to know is: how is this going to go? Am I going to like you? Am I going to like this process? How do I know when it’s going right, and when it’s not? And, maybe most important: what do I don’t know I don’t know? Who can I trust?

What are you not telling me?

I think by and large, we’re an industry that fails to see ourselves through the eyes of our clients. As both this tweet here and the guy who made Slack and Flickr (but mostly Slack) have said, we’re trying to sell people saddles when they’re barely thinking about horseback rides.

Maybe she’s barn with it.

We all know that too many client relationships turn to shit—even the ones that start off well. And we know that, more often than not, it’s not because anyone’s a cunt. Usually, it’s because of poor communication, a breakdown of trust, and a misalignment of incentives. 

So I want to try something different. Something less positive, more realistic. A little manual for what to expect, in good times and bad, based on past experience. 

A little more honesty. 

What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

This is a process. It’s a journey. It will have ups and downs. Times when there seems to be momentum, times when time stands still. This is natural. This is normal. This is part of the process. 

Some things we wish we’d said to clients before we started:

No, nobody quite knows what we want until we start. 

These two scenarios are the most common: 1) client doesn’t really know what they want or need, or; 2) client thinks they need one thing and end up needing something else entirely. This is problematic, but also pretty typical for anyone with a services business. We build our own process around this inevitable uncertainty: we start out with workshops and ballpark figures so that we can figure out what’s needed first, and work through the details together. 

Yes, this is an investment. So only invest what you can afford.  

Your business doesn’t have infinite money, and you don’t have infinite time. This is an expensive project on both counts, so you want to make sure that you’re starting with what you can actually afford. Saying the budget is “not fixed” just tells us that you’re looking for the best possible price. But the chances that we’re going to come in significantly lower than your expectations are exceptionally low. Why? Because if you’re not big enough to have hired someone on your side of the boardroom table that’s been through this before (say, a brand manager) then the $50–250k range that we usually work from as a baseline will probably seem significant to you.

Of course, we can tell you what your budget should be given your situation, but that doesn’t work well either, because what you’re probably looking for is some objective opinion. You can’t trust an agency to tell you, because they’re probably trying to get the best price they can, right? So instead, you’re looking to get some sort of spread from 3-7 agencies that look about as competent as each other, and figure out a happy medium (or median.)

If that’s the case… great! You’re very much not alone. Rather than playing it close to your chest, I’d recommend being open about that, and trying to give a ballpark. Something like:

“We’re talking to 5 other agencies to see what their response, approach, scope and pricing looks like. We’re not willing to spend any less than $X, but we’re absolutely not wanting to go any higher than Y. We’re willing to pay more for work we think is better/more comprehensive/more compelling/whatever, but price will absolutely be a factor. Do you think you can provide a quote that will be worth your while, and worth our money?”

While our initial consultancies are fixed-price, the bulk of our budgets are typically a function of Time x Rate + Materials, and we can work within a budget by choosing what to focus on. But as a rule of thumb, if you don’t want to spend any less than $50k on a brand and $30k on a basic website, that’s completely fine, but then you have to limit your expectations. Just as you don’t wander on the Porsche parking lot with $26,999 (drive away) in your pocket, you can’t expect the world if you’re not willing to pay for it.

Yes, this is an investment… and not an expense. You should expect get some ROI.

You should be clear on what success looks like to your and your business, independent of whatever your agency might think. How will you know if this is a success? More traffic to your website? More sales? A higher gross margin on your products? Your mum is prouder of you and what you do?

As always, quantifying whichever metrics you can is always going to lead to clearer discussions about what is and isn’t working. And having these conversations up front helps you to understand if you’re working with the right agency: want to improve your traffic 15% MoM? Your branding agency probably isn’t going to want to be held accountable to that. Maybe go talk to a content agency instead. Failure to do so will lead to nervous nodding early on, and potentially vehement disagreements when it gets to The Crunch.

If you can’t attach some kind of objective success metrics to this project, consider the possibility that perhaps what you want is just to feel better about your brand. You want it to look cooler, or slicker than your competition. That’s OK too. But tell us that, because then we know that our Target Audience isn’t actually your customer, it’s you. And we can act accordingly.

Yes, this is an investment… of your time and energy. Either collaborate with us, or trust us.

The ideal relationship is a collaborative one; nobody knows your business better than you do, and the success of your new brand will ultimately be its internal adoption. So it’s critical to the success of the project that you make time to focus on what we’re doing. The #1 delay for all of our projects has been clients not responding in time, or not focussing fully on what they’ve been shown. We realise you’re busy, and we try and manage this process to make it as easy as possible for you. But if you want this project completed on-time and on-budget, you’ll need to set that time aside for regular catch-ups and assessments. Don’t wait until 2 days before launch to finally try your website out. Do read our emails. That sort of thing.

Finally, if you don’t have the capacity to focus on a full rebrand or a whole new ecommerce website, chances are that it’s not critical to your business right now anyway, and perhaps you just don’t need that kind of help all that much. 

In some rare cases we’ve worked with clients who’ve trusted us fully and disengaged almost entirely, and we’ve been able to create something epic. But really consider whether or not this is something you’re willing to do — more often than not, that trust flies out the window about 24 hours before the rubber hits the road, when all of a sudden the client wants to change things they’d not paid attention to up until the last minute. Consider how difficult that would be to manage if your clients, customers or suppliers did that to you.

No, not everyone will like what we do together. 

And that’s OK. In fact, it’s a good thing. Remember, if you please everybody, you’ll wind up inspiring nobody.

In fact, the people who care the most about not offending anyone are the ones who nobody likes. So while you need to make sure that the key stakeholders in your business are heard, it’s not your job (or ours) to pander to every single person’s individual tastes, or, worse, to find the vanilla middle-ground that nobody feels strongly about. If that’s what you want, we believe you’re better off going to 99 Designs and casting a vote like Survivor. 

Similarly, your message isn’t for every consumer on the planet, which is why we take the time up front to articulate who your consumer really is. If you think you’re going to create a brand that’s accessible to every single person on the planet, let us know straight away, so that we can politely decline the invitation for mutually-assured destruction. And don’t point to Apple and say “but they did it!” unless you have the budget, vision and patience to spend decades and billions on doing it.

No, we won’t be looking to you for graphic design advice.

Are you a typographer? Is graphic design your passion? Do you want a job working with our design team? Probably not. We spend hours and hours pouring over our font choices, picking the type styles that we think will be best-suited to your message and your audience. Feedback like “we don’t want a serif because it’s not modern”, or “we don’t want caps because it sounds like shouting” sounds like thoughtful subject-matter expertise, but it’s less Kris Sowersby and more Dunning Kruger.

That does not mean that our choices are always correct. Or that our educated word on graphic design is immutable law — that’s reasoning by authority, and we’re nullius in verba types. It means that graphic design is a complex tool that is used in the service of an outcome. As in most cases, an answer looking super simple usually says more about the eyes of the beholder than the complexity of the situation. We welcome all of our clients to get into the weeds — say with a discussion on type — to talk through our decisions and question our solutions. The only thing we ask is that everyone comes to these conversations with more questions than answers (or… advice).

Yes, we will want to discuss User Experience with you. 

That doesn’t mean we don’t want your opinion — far from it. We never get it totally right the first time. Asking us why we’ve made the choices we’ve made, discussing how things make you feel, telling us where you don’t think we’ve hit the mark, and generally bringing another opinion to the table outside of ours is critical to well-rounded work. 

So when something doesn’t feel right, we absolutely want to know.

Yes, you’ll know when it feels right. 

Our job is not to come up with something new and incredible. Our job is to listen to everything you tell us, and figure out the best way to articulate it. Often, that’ll come straight out of your mouth. So, if and when we present to you, we don’t want you to feel side-swiped, or shocked, like we’re crazy, shorts-wearing geniuses. Contrary to what some will have you believe, we’re not actually selling actual magic. We’re more like magicians. Bad ones, that show you their tricks.

In fact, we want you to be borderline pissed off that you couldn’t have done that yourself. That it all could have been so simple. Because if you’ve got anything worth saying, chances are, it’s on the tip of your tongue the whole time.

We already work for love. You can use this to your advantage.

The truth is, we’ll always be looking for ways to make what we do for you better and better. It’s in our blood — it’s what we do for love. But our time, our energy, and our love itself is still a finite resource. It’s maths: the more time we spend going back and forth on personal opinions, extra options, and sweating details of preference, the less time we get to spend on going above and beyond to deliver something that you never thought possible. 

So, the choice is yours: do you want us to spend time developing another 2 options for the sake of having options, or would you rather we spend that time thinking about how we can push the project another two steps further than we all thought?

We work for Love + Money.

It’s not an easy process. Creating a simple solution to a complex question is always tough. Anyone who says that to you is either lying, or used to doing something so by-the-book and boring that it’s probably not worth whatever you’re paying for it. But we’re in it for the long haul if you are too. 

We work for Love + Money. If you do too, we want to work with you.