Studio Note #38: You Can’t Add Strategy at the End.
Strategy works better before the walls go up.
I had a meeting yesterday with a group looking to create a new brand underneath a much larger organization. It's a pretty common model. The parent company provides the infrastructure, but the individual team wants something of its own. Something more local, more relevant to the market and ultimately more useful for building their own business.
We talked about what that could look like, what it would take to build it and what it would cost. Then the conversation inevitably turned to where they could save some money.
One of the ideas was to create the identity themselves, get everything rolling and then bring me in later with a smaller budget to help make it all work.
That's a problem, and not because I think every business needs to spend a fortune on branding. They don't. It's a problem because they're proposing doing things in the exact opposite order.
By the time I come in, the decisions I should have helped make have already been made. The name has been chosen. The logo exists. The visual direction has been established. Maybe the website has been built. Materials have been created. People have started seeing it and money has already been spent.
At that point, you're not hiring me to develop the brand. You're hiring me to work around it.
It's a little like framing a house yourself and then calling the architect to come over and figure out how to make the floor plan work. Maybe they can, but you've eliminated a lot of the possibilities before they ever walked through the door.
This comes up all the time with creative work because the finished product is the most visible part of the process. You see the logo, but you don't see all the decisions that led to it. So it can be tempting to think that the logo is the thing you're paying for. If you can get that part handled cheaply, maybe you can bring someone in later to polish it up.
But the value isn't just in someone's ability to make the final thing look better. It's knowing what the thing should be in the first place.
That's where strategy comes in. Who are you trying to reach? How do you want to position yourself? What makes you different from everyone else doing essentially the same thing? What should this feel like? What should it absolutely not feel like?
Those decisions influence the name, the identity, the messaging and everything that follows. They aren't something you sprinkle on afterward.
There's only so much you can do once the foundational decisions have already been made. At that point, the work becomes less about determining what the brand should be and more about figuring out how to make the existing pieces work together.
You can make things prettier. You can clean things up and make the pieces fit together. But that's not the same thing as building the right thing from the beginning.
If you want someone's expertise, bring them in before you make the decisions their expertise is supposed to inform.
You can't add strategy at the end.