Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

A meeting with a prospective client today afforded me the chance to talk about Steve Turner's, and my, favorite subject. Namely, our shop. Well, maybe not quite that crassly but I did get the opportunity to yammer at some length about some salient, competitive differences. Here's the abridged version:

Within a ten block radius of the Turner/DeVaughn studio, in the South o' Market district of S.F., there are probably a dozen purveyors of services and deliverables such as ours. A few of them inhabit our building. The difference between us and a number of them? Their readiness and eagerness to relieve a client of his/her hard-won capital by delivering precisely what the client asks for, and/or whatever they suspect the client will likely buy. The problem is that any causation or correlation between what that client buys and that thing's ability to put a bigger number on the top line of the client's income statement is, to paraphrase the old movie disclaimer, purely coincidental. This is not the way to practice marketing, advertising, or branding in the Internet Age, or any other age past or future.

A good test for the kind of agency you want to throw in with is to feel its readiness not to sell, ingratiate, flatter, flummox or substantiate your hunches and pre-conceived ideas; but to look you straight in the eye and flat out tell you that you don't know what you don't know. Here's an example. Say you have cool idea for a "Web 2.0" business. You shop around for a web designer to kick your concepts up several notches. You think you have your target in the crosshairs, in terms of potential customers, and you think you're closing in on your brand promise. So , you ask for a proposal. If the agency you're talking to tells you sit down, take a deep breath and several steps back, you're probably in the company of guys who are, indeed worth talking to. If, on the other hand, you get a proposal for an incredibly cheap website that basically borrows your watch to tell you what time it is, just say "no". Please.

Getting to a real proposal for real work on an architecture for the content that's going to turbo-charge your topline necessitates the rigors of someone asking, and your answering, some very comprehensive and occasionally "stupid" questions. Something called, for lack of a better term, a preliminary proposal. More about this, tomorrow.