What is it About the Cobbler’s Kids?
The cobbler’s kids have no shoes for the same reason a brand design firm takes so long to update its own brand. While we absolutely live and breathe to shape and steward our clients’ unique brands, it’d been almost 14 years since the launch of our previous brand identity and 4 years since our last major overhaul of pbdh.com. So last August we got a new client: us. We knew that was the only way to make it happen, even though we knew we’d probably end up being the worst client we’ve ever had.
We started where you’re supposed to start: brand positioning. Creative firms are notorious for being positioning-less, since most are willing to be whatever clients want them to be. Also, a lot of firms end up being havens for undiagnosed ADHD sufferers, so focusing on a long-term positioning strategy for the firm itself—without the wonder and sex appeal of an actual client—can be difficult to orchestrate. Even if one person cares fervently, other stakeholders are pre-occupied with client work (go figure).
We did manage to focus long enough to develop what we believed to be a great brand position. We called it Small and Mighty and we loved how it celebrated our unique place in the marketplace. As an independent firm with a 25-year history, we thought it pointed out how we’re smaller than the too bigs, bigger than the too smalls, and mighty in our strategic and creative expertise. But this was a classic blunder. The concept was too much about us and not enough about our relationship with clients. Of course, when developing strategy for our clients, we expertly counsel them about avoiding this mistake, so you’d think we’d know better. But being a client was harder than we thought and made us realize that, when it’s all about you and your business (which it is for our clients), this is hard stuff to sort out. We’re hoping this realization makes us an even better guide and advocate for our clients.
So we started over. We went back and thought more about what makes us different, and if any of those differences were anything our clients would really care about. Concurrently, we’d been tinkering with how we develop and present our work. Instead of showing three refined directions after mowing through most of the budget, we were shrugging off our sense of vulnerability and showing dozens and dozens of rough sketches early on and encouraging clients to explore them with us. We’d also been architecting a new deliverable, called Ideation Lab, which invited our clients directly into the brainstorming process. We were having tremendous success with our new approach, even though nothing was really broken with our old one. What was moving us forward was the realization that the standard model of agency-client relationships is too territorial. This is the standard set-up: client briefs agency and agrees to pay agency. Agency then retreats to some undefined territory where “the magic happens” and tells the client to sit tight—for several weeks—until agency returns with the magic. But our process was definitively moving away from that model. Instead, we were openly inviting our clients into all aspects of the brand development process. So we had a bold idea: maybe we are the most transparent brand design firm. We were getting great results and glowing feedback from current clients about our inclusive approach to brand design and the creative process. We road-tested it with prospective clients during pitch meetings, and we got great feedback from them as well. So that was it. In a word, transparency. We’re striving to be the most transparent brand design firm.
But that was not it. Not quite. Thanks to some expert guidance from someone outside the house that pushed us a bit further—perhaps proving that no one, not even experts who do this for a living, can develop positioning without a trusted, objective, external partner. We were urged to be more clear about who we’re best suited to serve, and to not focus so exclusively on our process. Positioning statements aren’t typically external-facing, but in the spirit of transparency, here’s the positioning statement we came up with:
Phinney Bischoff Design House is a leading brand design and ideation firm on the West Coast. We work with clients in highly competitive markets to help them develop breakthrough ideas through an inclusive, transparent creative process.
Finished. This idea is who we are, what we do, and how we do it. It’s our promise to the market. From this idea we’ve completely refreshed our voice and redesigned our look and feel—including a new logo, business papers, Web site, and more.
Now for the big question: what do you think of our new brand?
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