There is a trap that sophisticated clients fall into more reliably than unsophisticated ones. They arrive with a reference deck. It contains seven or eight brands they admire. They have thought carefully about what they admire in each. They can articulate it.
The trap is that they are about to pay a creative agency to make them look like the intersection of those references.
This is not a brief. It is a request for visual camouflage.
The problem with recognition is that it requires difference. You cannot recognise something unless it is distinct from its surroundings. But clients who have built their reference decks from within a single category have curated a set of things that are already alike. The brief they hand over is, at base: make me fit in with the best-looking people at the party.
Fitting in is the opposite of being recognised.
We had a client — a private members’ club operating in three cities — come to us with a deck of eight brands. Four were other private members’ clubs. Two were luxury hotel groups. Two were high-end restaurant groups. All of them used the same sans-serif weights, the same muted palette (cream, warm grey, forest green, or navy), the same pattern of restrained logo with generous white space.
The brief was, essentially: we want to look like this but more so.
We declined the brief as framed. We offered to start somewhere else: not from what the client admired, but from what the client’s members actually experience that they cannot find anywhere else.
That conversation took three weeks. It was uncomfortable. At the end of it we had a brief worth executing.
The question worth asking is not who do we want to look like? It is what do we know that nobody else knows?
Every organisation that has operated for long enough has proprietary knowledge — things they have learned from proximity to their clients, their craft, their failures — that their competitors do not have. That knowledge is the raw material of a distinctive brand. Not the reference deck.
The reference deck is what you use to calibrate execution once you have found something worth executing.
Recognition is earned by difference. Difference requires the courage to stop looking at the category long enough to look at what you actually are.
Most clients find this harder than expected.
Most clients, once they do it, are surprised by what they find.