The case for having a strong in-house design function is made by the voices in the main article here, but there are of course many benefits to working with outside design consultancies.
Both Richard Newland, head of design and development for HSBC, and Maggie Hodgetts, head of graphic design at Waitrose, argue that it is actually a careful blend of in-house and external design work which can offer the most potent results.
So what can consultancies deliver over in-house design teams? Firstly, broad experience and a track record of creative excellence are obvious benefits of commissioning certain design groups. The best groups in their field can offer very high levels of expertise, as well as deep knowledge of market sectors, competitor companies and different business strategies; an in-house team, by contrast, is necessarily focused on just one business – its own.
‘[Your designers] need to understand the competitor context through having worked with other companies,’ says Kate Blandford, former head of design at Sainsbury’s and now an independent consultant. ‘Getting that balance right is tricky and is probably harder with an in-house team because you’d need to let them go out and do other things, which may be hard to justify.’
At the same time, commissioning external groups allows bespoke, finite projects to be undertaken at a high level of design skill without placing a fixed design overhead on the balance sheet. This means outside consultancies may prove to be more economical and more creative for some businesses.
Scale is another issue. For businesses with large volumes of design output an in-house team may not be feasible. ‘In 2010, we’ll do around 1,000 different types of work and 100 different sorts of head office environment. Having a full design team in-house to handle all that would be immense and commercially impossible,’ explains Newland.
And perhaps the most obvious benefit of using external groups is the creative freshness it can bring to a business. Even consultancies enjoying deep, long-term relationships with their clients are still ultimately positioned outside the client business and are able to see things from a different perspective. And bringing in a brand new consultancy can deliver a creative shot in the arm which might be all but impossible to achieve with a permanent in-house design team.