James Archer

Pitch Perfect

The article Mad Men: Pitch Perfect on Design Observer struck me tonight, because it reflected something that I’ve been pondering for a while now:

Good designers are a dime a dozen, he said. Coming up with a great design solution is the easy part. The hard part, he said, is getting the client to accept the solution.

At Forty, we spend a lot of time analyzing our competition, and one of the quirky things we’ve noticed is that work quality is almost completely unrelated to success. That’s obviously frustrating to us (since we tend to be idealistic about our craft), but that’s the reality we’re up against.

So, we’re learning to move beyond merely doing great work to get to the point where we’re also selling the greatness of the work. It doesn’t do us any good to design a fantastic website or put together a brilliant branding strategy if the client doesn’t understand or appreciate what they’re getting.

It reminds me of the Wrecked Exotics phenomenon of naive rich guys horribly trashing beautiful vehicles them because they don’t understand the basic physics of the car they’ve just purchased. In the past, we’ve run into that same situation with our clients: build a great marketing solution and then wonder why they ignore half of it and wreck the other half.

In order for our clients to make the best use of the work we provide, they need to understand it. In order to help them understand it, we have to sell it to them. It’s a crazy, crowded, and chaotic world out there, and sometimes the good and noble truths need a little showmanship to help them get the attention they deserve.