Great work comes from great clients
“Great work comes from great clients.”
We’ve said that so many times. Both at new business introductions, and at the end of projects. Usually, it’s in response to our clients complimenting us. They often say we’re being polite when we reverse the compliment, but it’s a fact. Ask the top creative agencies where their best work comes from. You’ll get the same answer.
So, what makes a client great?
Well, if you’re a client and reading this, that’s gotta be a good sign.
For context, let’s describe what makes a creative great.
Great creatives actively listen and learn. They’re diligent, accountable and accessible. They’re able to distill complex business objectives into a simple, well told story that inspires an audience. Great creatives have been trained how to gather input from stakeholders, study the marketplace, help form a strategy based on human insights, recognize patterns in culture, originate and present nascent ideas, gather and aggregate effective feedback to progress those ideas step by step to shape a singular brand experience that lifts a business to new heights. Great creatives are more than makers of things, they’re architects of brands.
Many of the most talented commercial artists around the world have studied, trained, practiced, written, taught and lectured about the creative process. It helps to attend the best schools. It helps to work at elite agencies and on iconic brands. It helps most of all to dedicate the hours, the days, the years to the rigor of blending art and commerce. It’s a demanding pursuit that never stops presenting new challenges. And how clients participate in this pursuit makes all the difference.
So (again) what makes a client great?
It may not be what you’re thinking. Some of the very best clients don’t have MBAs. Many do, but some have had little or no marketing training. Some have never taken a marketing course of any kind. Few have taken a creative writing class, design course or even an art class beyond grade school level. Training in the arts is not a prerequisite to being a great client. Clients can have sublime taste or none at all. Visual literacy can expedite things, but either way, savvy businesspeople recognize that their agency should be the ultimate tastemakers and be strategically driven to make aesthetic decisions that match form with function.
Absolutely anyone with any role that interacts with an agency can be a great contributor. They can be critical stakeholders or casual participants. They can be business owners, board members, directors, managers, full-time employees, contractors, consultants, freelancers or even interns. They can be pragmatists, dreamers or both.
What makes them fundamentally great?
It starts with empathy.
Great clients place their audience at the center of their brand and make them the hero of their story. That doesn’t mean they have no point of view. Great clients believe that strong brands define their audience, and weak brands let their audience define them. They use focus groups and data to check their gut, not replace it. They know safe work gets ignored, and trying to be everything to everybody fails in business just as it fails in life. Sometimes this means being comfortable with being uncomfortable, because that’s often where surprise, delight, and growth happen.
It expands with collaboration.
Every project is a team effort. Every contributor brings areas of expertise, including our clients. The best set us up for success by blending their expertise with ours. They make certain we are fully briefed with critical business insights, budget and timing constraints, audience profiles, action items, objectives, goals, and the results they’re looking for. And then they refer to that same brief as the criteria for review while leaving room for fascinating discoveries.
Great clients lead the way at the beginning of most projects, but are willing to be led after that. They don’t art direct imagery and graphic design, edit video or write copy. They don’t try to pick fonts, choose colorways, rearrange layouts, or modify UX and UI. They don’t crowdsource opinions, cast doubt, indulge fear, lose focus or lose faith.
It lands with commitment.
Tenacity is often the only difference between good and great. Great clients value creative excellence as a business tool. They recognize that having a powerful brand is a competitive advantage and that the spend is an investment, not an expense. They agree with Mies van der Rohe that “God is in the details” and that how you do anything is how you do everything. Great clients hate mediocrity as much as we do because it’s bad for business. They hire great agencies and advocate for them until the work is done perfectly and then continue to preserve the integrity of that work as brand stewards.
We love making great work.
But it can’t happen without the trust of a great client.
So when we say great work comes from great clients, we mean it. Empathy, collaboration, and commitment make creative excellence possible. When clients bring those qualities, the work has somewhere to go. And where it goes tends to be remarkable.
