Don’t Hate Your Clients
There’s a whisper in the air that flows through creative circles that tells us a profound lie: “the client is going to ruin your project.” We’re inundated publicly with this idea through websites like Clients From Hell and privately, in the comfort of our iMac filled offices, when coworkers deride clients for their “horrible” choices. Straw men are easily constructed and then knocked down in an attempt to justify our dissatisfaction — without any attention paid to the validity of our customer’s concerns. We strive to exclude the client from decisions as often as possible in order to “preserve the integrity” of the project. Here’s the truth: there are only two reasons a client will ever disagree with you and “ruin” your project — either you haven’t educated them properly or you’re wrong.
It really is that simple. Unfortunately, accepting that statement would require us (creative practitioners) to take responsibility for educating the client and/or being wrong — two things creatives don’t enjoy terribly much.
Disclaimer: Anecdotally, 98% of the stories I read on Clients From Hell or hear about from other people are the result of one of the two aforementioned problems. However, there is a fringe 2% of clients that really are just impossible to educate. Try not working with that 2%.
Education
I’m going to give creators the benefit of the doubt and suggest that the majority of the problem comes from a lack of education, not being wrong. Whether you’re a graphic designer, video director, whatever, you probably put a great amount of thought into your creations. You incorporate the client’s strategy, good design principles, and make something amazing — that’s why they’re paying you. Because of all this effort, you’re thinking is normally on-point and could be considered “right” for the project.
There’s an engineering term known as the Single Point of Failure (SPOF) that describes one point in a system that, if it fails, will cripple the entire system. For creative practitioners, sharing the story behind your creative decisions, design decisions, and every other decision (education) is the most common SPOF.
We can create the most amazing designs/videos/sculptures the world has ever seen, but have them quickly derailed by a lack of effort in educating the client about the reasons behind our brilliance. Being able to explain why your idea works is equally as important as producing it well.
The reason behind the importance of being able to explain your idea takes us to the depths of human nature. It manifests itself in the same form as your grandfather’s reluctance to get an iPhone—we don’t like things we don’t understand. To reinforce this point, I point you to one of the songs in a Disney classic, Beauty and the Beast.
“We don’t like what we don’t understand, in fact it scares us, and this monster is mysterious at least…” —The Villagers, Beauty and the Beast
Beyond a fear of things we don’t understand, here’s a few other specific reasons you should focus more on educating your clients.
Your working relationships will become cooperative instead of contentious.
If your clients are constantly second-guessing you and forcing changes with which you don’t agree, that’s probably not going to change on it’s own. Choosing to educate your clients allows you to work toward the same goal cooperatively instead of moving in different directions, each pursuing your own idea. When you’re both working towards the same goal, understanding each other’s point of view, your relationship becomes one of cooperation rather than contention.
It’s their job to know the “why?” behind your work, because they will likely have to explain it to their “clients.”
Andy Baker, SVP/Group Creative Director at National Geographic Channels, writes an amazing blog about the creative process from a client’s perspective. A topic on which he regularly writes is the need to explain the creative treatments he receives from agencies to his “clients,” who happen to be his bosses at NGC. One of his favorite phrases is “clients have clients too.”
This is a fact that is commonly forgotten in the world of creators — often your client contact is not the final decision-maker at their organization. If you’re not giving them the ammunition they need to sell your idea to their bosses, they’ll change your idea to make it something they can explain.
The client wants to be involved in the creative process because it’s fun.
As creators of things, we’re fortunate enough to have jobs that are more fun than 90% of other jobs. However, for a client, this project might be the only creative endeavor they produce in an entire year and they want to be involved. You can either choose to involve them in your ideas or let them force involvement by coming up with their own ideas and compelling you to act on them. If you choose to exclude your clients instead of educate them, you’re prohibiting them from enjoying the experience.
Educating your clients will help them enjoy the experience, and they’ll want to hire you again for their next project.
Clients who understand your decisions and enjoy the experience will come back to you. It doesn’t matter if you give your client the flat minimalist equivalent of a Matisse—if you didn’t include them in the process, they’re not going to want to work with you again.
You might actually learn something from your clients.
Through my position at Identity, I interact with a fair amount of individuals who create things. Without fail, the people who appear to believe they’ve reached a precipice in their ability to learn from others are the ones whose work impresses me the least. I believe the single greatest quality a maker of things can have is an insatiable appetite for learning — and that includes the ability to learn from clients.
I’m not talking about skills like how to light a scene or layout a magazine, but skills about listening, strategy development, designing for a purpose, and more. Clients spend their days figuring out how to best use the things you create and learning more about their struggles will help you produce more effective work.
Being Wrong
Before I finish, I want to touch on the second reason your client might disagree with you — because you’re wrong. Sometimes you’re wrong and the client is right. One of the best qualities a creator can have is the ability to understand when they’re wrong, because pride cometh before the fall.
One Last Thing
I reached out to a few clients about the subject of this article and they expressed something I thought was very important to share. Clients can sense when you don’t like them.
It’s not necessarily a tingling on the back of their neck like Spiderman, but it’s a palpable feeling that you just don’t like working with them. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that if a client knows you don’t like them, they’re not going to hire you again.
The Bright Side
Interacting with your clients can be REALLY enjoyable! When you approach every relationship with the desire to inform and educate, you’ll never dread another client phone call again.
Admittedly, it will be harder and require more time than simply deriding the client under your breath. However, you’ll probably find that a lot of those things you loved about your idea actually make it to print instead of being lost on the cutting room floor.
Samuel Cowden is an Executive Producer at Identity Visuals, a Nashville-based motion design studio creating visual narratives to communicate great ideas.
