What Even is Branding? And our Low Key Efforts to Abolish Design Snobbery.
I’ve done a lot of finger-pointing at how clients treat creatives. And how the creative industry treats its own workers. But let’s have a chat about how creatives treat their clients. This will be the ONLY time that I publicly SHAME my own kind - because honestly, clients can be the WORST sometimes! But what about when they’re not? What happens when, as a client, you arrive at a branding agency genuinely looking for help, guidance, and the sharp skills of branding professionals? And yet you’re met with pretentious judgey design snobs?
Most large branding agencies DO NOT take the time to teach clients what branding IS or why they need it. They assume that since you’re at their doorstep, you MUST know what “branding” is … because you’re requesting it. They don’t realize that you’re there because you only know it’s something you need, but you don’t actually know what it entails. They forget that you are a business owner, an entrepreneur, a manager, etc, consumed by the inner workings of your own job and industry. They completely overlook the fact that you might need to know the very basics of what branding is, how it works, what it’s made of, and WTF it’s going to do for you.
When you arrive at the average agency’s cold and elegantly sterile conference room, they offer you bottled water and begin to present themselves to you as this elusive abstract service, speaking in circles and using words that you feel you’ve only heard in dystopian films. This design-speak is aimed to make their job sound so obvious and important, that you’d feel too stupid to DARE ask “wait, but what IS branding?”
They perform this circus of smoke and mirrors and flash pretty lifestyle images on a big screen. You look around as your peers nod their heads as if they know what any of this means. They usually don’t. I can tell you that I’ve even worked with MARKETING professionals that don’t understand what branding is - no one ever told them and they’ve just faked their knowledge with vague design-sounding words in order to get in the industry. I’m dead serious.
I come from this convoluted, over-dramatized design atmosphere, but I did not want that for my studio. When you come to Occult Creative, we walk you through every step. In our initial meetings, there are visuals, explanations, and a judgment-free Q&A segment. When we do receive clients that are brave enough to ask “what is branding?” … it’s usually accompanied by their profuse apologies and a deep shame of not knowing. I am writing this to remind you that this is OUR SPECIALTY - not yours. We went to school for this. You went to school for something else. This is why you’re hiring us.
So what even is branding? Branding is this: It’s an identity for a company. It consists of a strict visual design system with lots of rules and a writing style that has a strategic personality. It consists of components [such as fonts and colors] that are only to be utilized in a specific way. It is a personalized design chemistry intended to make your company immediately recognizable. So when consumers see signs, packaging, or a commercial, they can immediately identify it without having to maintain any real focus. That’s it. And It’s not your job to understand any more than that.
There’s an invisible pedestal that designers put themselves on. I’m not quite sure why, maybe it’s compensation for the years of being undervalued, and disposed of. Our pretension and high design standards are, honestly, all we have. I mean it, the SOLE perk of being a designer is being able to pretend we’re better than you because it’s sure as hell, not the pay or the hours. Not to defend bad behavior, but if we were respected just a tiny bit more as a profession, I doubt we’d be that way.
Ultimately we are a tactical, utilitarian service like a plumber or an electrician. (I know about 10 designers that would DIE if they heard me describe it as such). But this is OUR expertise, we are here to put our education and experience to work for you.
Listen, this doesn’t mean I'm not going to side-eye you for your horrible taste. If my studio designs something for you, and you don’t like it, I will defend it and forever think you are wrong. But, no designer-client transaction should be a harrowing, shameful, or confusing experience. The relationship should be based on mutual respect of the others’ position. Clients should be able to find a design firm that will listen and clearly answer any questions they may have about the process. And design firms should begin a relationship with the understanding that they are there not to shame, but to help.