We’re giving away all of our brand strategy and design secrets — here’s why.
When a colleague first suggested that we share our entire brand toolkit, via our website, I thought he’d lost his marbles. If you’ve got something as precious as an approach that works, aren’t you supposed to guard it, Gollum-like, from anyone who might steal it, and thence your competitive advantage?
Well, perhaps not.
As a service business, our greatest challenge arguably isn’t out-competing rival agencies. It’s ensuring there’s demand for agency services in the first place. After all, before any of us can get hired, a client must first have decided they would be better off using a specialist than trying do the job “in house” (or not bothering to do it at all).
At a recent pitch, a would-be client admitted to me that they’d left their brand strategy and identity untended for a number of years because “we hired a famous agency, and they charged us a fortune and delivered naff all.” There’s a lesson in this: Underperformance from one of us can remove a customer from all of us.
That’s why my original instinct — to keep our methods to ourselves — is counterproductive. We’re not in a static market. Demand fluctuates according to (among other factors) the value we’re seen to provide. In the long term, opportunities depend not just on one’s own performance, but on the performance of one’s peers as well.
From this point of view, sharing one’s toolkit widely and completely makes long-term sense. The more transparent and discursive we agencies are with each other, the greater our chances of improving our aggregate performance, and increasing our collective worth.
This attitude is nothing new, of course. ‘Open source thinking’ has flourished in many sectors and for many decades already. Yet the success of this movement depends on the willingness of individual companies to treat rival firms not as mortal enemies, but as part of a collective, working to grow the capabilities, and appeal, of their industries as a whole. If we want the creative industry to flourish in the long term, perhaps we must come to see our so-called competitors in much the same way.
Saboteur will be releasing a module of our brand toolkit once per month on our website, starting today, and continuing for the foreseeable future. It will be fantastic if this ‘reveal-all’ helps build our reputation. But it will be even better if it provokes conversation and criticism; inspires other agencies to share their own approaches, and helps encourage the continuous improvement that our industry — like any industry — needs to reach its potential. We’re giving away all our brand strategy secrets, and that’s why.
