Most founders come to a brand project with little experience. Maybe they have done it once, years ago, in a different business under different circumstances. Maybe never. And the stories that travel are the bad ones: the project that drifted for months, the reveal that landed flat, the website that never lived up to its promise. Good projects rarely make for stories. They just produce brands that work. So this article is for anyone doing this for the first time, or the first time in a long while. It covers what the work involves, what it will ask of you, and how to set yourself and your agency up to succeed.
The previous article ended with a figure: what a failing brand costs over twelve months. Before this series gets to what fixing it costs, let’s cover the questions that have come up over the years. What am I signing up for? How long will it take? How much of my time will it eat? And how will we measure success? The last one is already half answered. The costs you counted in the last article are the measures. Count them again a year after launch.
Strategy first, then creative execution
Every project we take on follows the same order: decide what the business is before deciding what it looks like, sounds like and how it acts.
The projects people regret almost always run the other way, and it is an easy mistake to make. Branding looks like a design-first process, because design is the part you end up seeing. What people miss is that the design cannot work effectively without a strategy behind it. Start with design and the big decisions do not get made when they need to be. Who you are for, what you stand for, where you fit in the market: those questions get answered too late, or worse, not at all.
And with no agreed strategy, there is nothing to test the design against, so everyone tests it against personal preference. Preference carries no credentials. You cannot tell whether an opinion about the identity comes from years of watching brands work or from a favourite colour, which means a business decision is being made on feel. The first article in this series called these taste conversations. Personal taste is dangerous, and every marketer worth their salt is taught why on day one: you are not the target market.
Strategy answers a short list of hard questions. What business are we really in? What has it become while everyone was busy running it? Who is it for now? Why should a buyer choose you over the alternatives? Appearance then makes those answers visible. Done in that order, the design conversations get far easier, because “do I like it?” gets replaced by “does it say what we decided?”.
The shape of the work
In plain terms, our brand projects have three parts.
First, strategy, facilitated and worked through methodically, but quite quickly. Sometimes that is in a room, sometimes on a screen. Depending on the business it might be a one-day strategy sprint or a series of Brand Bullseye workshops, a day and a half in the communications-focused form, two and a half days in full if we’re also looking to align your people and culture with your brand strategy. The reason the work happens in weeks rather than months is that the decision-makers are together, so a question that surfaces before lunch is decided by the end of the day instead of joining the agenda of a meeting three weeks away.
Second, the appearance system. Not a logo, a system: logo, colour, typography, photography, graphic language, layout, sound and motion, all built from the strategy and tested against it. Then we stress-test it across the full range of places it will live: print, digital, the built environment. Done properly, the system is designed for the full context of where the brand shows up in the world, and that is why it keeps working for many years.
Third, rollout. The website, the templates, the collateral, the advertising. These are the places a customer actually meets your brand, tackled in priority order rather than all at once.
From workshop to a launched identity in the market, you’re looking at three to six months. Client involvement is front-loaded: heavy in the strategy days, then dropping to scheduled review points where decisions are needed.
What it asks of you
The honest answer: less time than you fear, and more people involved than you planned.
The strategy days need the owner or founder and key people or the executive team in the room with their phones off. Strategy is made of decisions about the direction of the business, and those decisions need what only leadership holds: knowledge of your market, your competitors, your margins, and what the company intends to become.
After the workshop, the load drops sharply. What remains is showing up to the review points with the same decisiveness the workshop had.
Where projects go wrong
The failures follow a pattern, and the first part of the pattern is not the one people expect.
Too few people in the room. Most founders assume a brand project fails from crowding, so they keep the group small and tidy. The opposite is the risk. Lots of voices are manageable; a workshop is built to hold them. What a project cannot survive is a person with influence who was not there. Every absent decision-maker is a future meeting where the work gets reopened. A project reopened in month four by someone who missed day one runs twice, and you pay for both runs. If someone can influence the outcome, they belong in the room at the start.
Weighting every opinion equally. Brand decisions are collective by nature; there is always a version of a committee. The question is how the votes are weighted. When every opinion counts the same, including the one you hired for its expertise, the work gets sanded down until it offends nobody, and work that offends nobody is invisible. You do not have to take every recommendation. You do have to give the people who do this for a living more weight than a show of hands.
Agreeing with the strategy instead of using it. The workshop happens, everyone agrees, the document gets circulated, and then execution starts and decisions go back to being made the old way: on preference, on precedent, on whoever is in the room that day. The strategy was bought as a stage of the project, not as the test for every decision after it. If the design conversations aren’t asking “does it say what we decided?”, the strategy has stopped doing the work you paid for.
What to hold an agency to
If you take one thing from this piece, take the client-side checklist.
A good agency asks about your business before it asks about your logo. It can play back who you are for and why a buyer should choose you over the alternatives before it shows you anything visual. It insists that everyone with influence over the outcome is in the room from the start. It can trace every design decision back to something you agreed together. And if the first thing you are shown is a mood board, ask what it is based on. The answer will tell you how the next six months are going to go.
Next in Brand, Honestly: what a brand project costs, with real numbers.
