Clients are becoming more and more adept at tapping into the services of design consultancies. Adam Woods asks design buyers what they are looking for.
If there ever was one standard template for the relationship between clients and designers, it’s a thing of the past. It seems that these days every client has a slightly different idea of how to get the best value out of its design partners. The view from the client side is becoming more and more nuanced.
Some clients are more inclined than ever to place design and branding specialists at the so-called top table, where their opinion counts in strategic matters across all digital and above-the-line platforms. Others don’t make room for a specialist design voice in their inner circle of marketeers, preferring to draw their closest advisors from other disciplines.
The tendency of big clients to maintain a roster of studios has certainly diminished too but, on the other hand, ongoing project work is more common. Some clients call on small, focused design outfits or freelances when they need them, rather than putting their brand in the hands of the big design groups; others insist that there is no substitute for the business thinking of the larger names and rely on the ongoing innovation of the external design resource.
BT Group’s long-serving Head of Design David Mercer has witnessed these shifts: ‘I think the design industry is going through some fairly significant changes, and it is also probably maturing, to a fairly large degree. I would say design is generally being taken more seriously as a business resource by large companies – therefore what we need from consultancies is a greater degree of professionalism and sophistication in the way they operate.’
Increased demand for maturity and professionalism in the design sector has inevitably entailed some uncomfortable moments. While overall fee income has risen narrowly in recent years, consultancies have been working harder for what they earn, often in the face of tougher, more price-driven competition. But what might be bad news for medium-sized to large consultancies isn’t necessarily a bad thing for designers – or for design.
The growth in the number of freelances – up by almost 40% since 2005 – has given a new dimension to how clients can choose to buy design.
‘It is not about size now, and there is no guarantee that the big boys will win,’ says Peggy Connor, Business Director at client/consultancy relationship specialist AAR. ‘We see work from very small consultancies that is really remarkable.’
There are two clear reasons for the slow rise of the smaller consultancy and the decline of the roster. First of all, in tough times, even blue-chip clients look for opportunities to cut back on retained suppliers. And second, many clients are now far more confident in the management of their own brand and their ability to call upon and brief nimble, creative designers on a project basis.
‘Going back, we used to work almost exclusively with very large consultancies and now we don’t,’ says Mercer. ‘It is to do with cost, it is to do with being cleverer in the way we procure this resource, and it is probably a matter of confidence, too.’
To an extent, that reflects the fact that branding and identity are maturing disciplines. Some clients have gleaned enough from third party consultancies on these matters that they now feel comfortable overseeing those things themselves.
‘When we have big identity challenges, we will call upon external consultancies, but we no longer have a roster of design groups like we did in the past,’ says Ben Spencer, Orange’s Head of Design and Retail Marketing. ‘By working very closely with branding consultancies, I think we have learned the dark arts of identity management.’
No matter how well I write the brief, I am really looking for something more than I was actually asking for
Other large clients continue to draw regularly on a variety of large and small consultancies. Barclaycard is one, and Senior Design and Identity Manager Sharon Zimmerli believes brands that don’t recognise the particular strengths of large and small consultancies are naive. ‘A couple of years ago, we found that the bigger branding consultancies were working out too expensive for the smaller projects, so we started working with some smaller consultancies as well, and that has been great.’
‘But if you are working on bigger pieces where you know there is a strategic sell-in through the business, where you have got bigger mountains to climb, rather than just a technical creative brief, it is absolutely good to work with the bigger consultancies, because they understand that mindset.’
Whether a consultancy is large or small, the measure of a good piece of design work remains largely the same as it always was. ‘No matter how well I write the brief, I am really looking for something more than I was actually asking for,’ says Mercer. ‘The ability to provide that is a good measure of a really good consultant or consultancy, and it marks out creativity in design from most other business resources I can think of.
As clients’ budgets are tightened and project fees replace retainers, new business has been ever more important for designers whose old business isn’t paying as well as it once did. Competition, meanwhile, has come from all sides as the basic rules of marketing communications have changed.
‘As far as branding and design are concerned, a lot of consultancies from different disciplines are now stealing that territory,’ says Connor. ‘And the ones that are successful are those that take the conversation to the client and say: ‘we solve issues’.
‘We have the best consultancies in the world, so quality isn’t an issue any more,’ she adds. ‘It is who understands the client best and, in commercial terms, who makes it easiest to buy.’
The watchwords of modern business, for designers and clients are better, cleverer, faster and more, and the difficult economic conditions have only hammered that home. Egos are decidedly out of fashion, as are experts who, however skilful in their core field, are not able to adapt to new models.
‘We feel it is all of our consultancies’ responsibility to deliver what their core disciplines are, but we encourage them to think about how a certain creative approach could be brought to life in different areas,’ says Spencer.
For some agencies, the modern tendency for clients to build a small panel of strategic advisors and to outsource the actual creative work as required is not necessarily a crushing blow. For all the talk of strategic roles, many design groups – especially the smaller ones – are happy to produce creative work to order, particularly given the challenges of billing for strategic advice.
While 90% of designers report that they only compete within the UK, clients say the growing international market for design should be taken seriously.
‘We live in a changing world, and I don’t think design is exempt from that,’ says Mercer. ‘That is a challenge, but it is also, I think, an opportunity. The best people, the ones who are fleet of foot, will survive and will do very well out of it.’
Rapha
Simon Mottram
It makes sense that relatively small businesses would use relatively small suppliers to fulfil their design requirements, though Simon Mottram, founder and Chief Executive of specialist cycling apparel brand Rapha, has other reasons for cherrypicking freelances and small-scale consultancies. A former design professional, Mottram tends to know the type of design he wants and usually knows where to find it. ‘I am not a business person who doesn’t get design,’ he says. ‘If I was, I might go for a consultancy too, rather than using the network I have. But ours is also a very focused brand, and deciding what to do next and how to get there is not usually a problem for us.’ The ease of cultivating and maintaining networks of suppliers has become ever easier, Mottram reflects, but he also raises a philosophical point about the nature of consultancies. ‘They are really just collections of freelances,’ he says. ‘I think what they really do well, though, is investing in (R&D that leads to) interesting new ideas and ways of doing things. That is something I’ve always really liked about consultancies, and I think it is important that somebody continues to do that.’
Barclaycard
Sharon Zimmereli
Barclaycard works with large and small design and branding firms, allocating work across a handful of regular vendors where appropriate and occasionally inviting pitches for particular projects. ‘We don’t have our branding consultancies on a retainer, but we will look at a piece of work that we know we want to push through for the year, we will assess who is best-placed for that and we will ask for a couple of quotes,’ says Senior Design and Identity Manager Sharon Zimmerli. A key attribute for a design, partner Zimmerli suggests, is not just to fulfil the brief, but also to question it when appropriate. ‘Because we don’t have an internal design department and we outsource all our creative work, we see our consultancies as an extension of our team,’ she says. ‘As a client, we respect consultancies that stand up and have an opinion, even if it is different to ours.'