What if your new brand
makes you a little nervous?
Branding
You hire an agency because something attracted you. Usually, the work. You saw something you wanted for your own business.
Then the presentation arrives, and suddenly you’re having a very different experience.
I understand that. I’ve been the nervous person in the room, too.
You liked their work. Then it became your business.
You’ve built this company. You have opinions. Probably fairly strong ones. That determination may be a big part of why the business exists in the first place.
Handing someone else this much influence over it is a weird thing to do.
Branding feels different from the inside.
Think about the brands you encounter every day. Apple is a fruit. Starbucks has a siren on the cup. Neither seems particularly alarming when you’re buying a laptop or a coffee.
Now imagine sitting in the meeting before any of those associations existed.
“A fruit?” “What does a mermaid have to do with coffee?”
Meanwhile, we can present something as simple as a bird and find ourselves discussing whether customers might think the business will fly away from them. Or whether some birds carry diseases.
You can do this to almost anything.
When you encounter a brand out in the world, you experience the whole thing. Its products, its language, its reputation, the people who use it. Those associations accumulate.
In a presentation, you’re looking at something new and asking it to explain itself immediately. It hasn’t had a chance to mean anything yet.
That’s worth remembering before deciding that unfamiliar means wrong.
He ended up wearing it.
There’s a Chase story I tell in pitches. Before the octagon, the bank’s logo had a map of the United States, a globe, and quite a lot to say about banking.
As you can imagine, the new symbol was a fairly big departure. Have a look at what they were being asked to leave behind.
David Rockefeller supported the idea. Chairman John McCloy and president George Champion were considerably less excited. According to designer Tom Geismar, McCloy eventually let Rockefeller go ahead, provided he didn’t have to see it on his own letterhead or in his office.
Roughly six months later, Geismar ran into McCloy wearing the symbol on his tie, his cufflinks, and a lapel pin. Apparently, he’d found a few places he was happy to see it.
The octagon is still part of Chase’s identity today. It had time to become associated with a company McCloy cared about. A little context. A little time. Eventually, cufflinks.
I once thought a unicorn was a terrible idea.
Years ago, we were working with Renaissance Homes, a custom home builder. Five very masculine gentlemen. My art director wanted to pitch them a unicorn.
A unicorn. For five men who build houses. If your mind just went straight to Lisa Frank, you’re beginning to understand my concern.
I thought he’d lost it.
Before you see it, take a second to picture what you’d expect us to present.
Five owners.
A unicorn.
We presented it. They loved it.
That stayed with me, partly because I was the one who needed to get out of the way. I trusted my art director enough to present an idea I wasn’t entirely comfortable with, and the clients were more open to it than I’d expected.
It taught me to pay attention to that slightly uncomfortable feeling.
Sometimes you’re seeing a problem. Sometimes you’re seeing something you haven’t seen before. It takes judgment to work out which.
You can revise the interesting part out of it.
There’s a point where an identity has been adjusted so many times that every possible objection has been addressed.
Unfortunately, nobody feels anything about it anymore.
Before you soften the thing that makes it special, try to name what’s bothering you. Is it difficult to read? Wrong for the audience? Those are useful things to work through together.
But if the feeling is simply “we haven’t seen anything like this before,” give it a little time. That may be the very thing you hired us to find.
You’re allowed to grow into it.
You’ve had years to get used to your business looking a certain way. The new idea has had about twenty minutes. Tough crowd.
Give it a little room. See it on your website, on your packaging, somewhere it can actually do its job. Ask us what we see in it. We should be able to tell you.
You may still have questions. So might we. But you can understand why an idea is right for your business before it feels completely comfortable.
That’s where a little trust matters. You hired us because our work made you see a possibility for your own business. Give yourself permission to follow that possibility a little further than you’re used to.
Something you’re nervous about today could become the thing you can’t imagine your business without.