A Response to Carey Smith
We met at a brightly lit coffee shop down the street on a cold November evening. My husband was taking care of the kids—Daddy on bath duty and dishes duty, both. A few college students sat around studying at the wooden tables in the fluorescent light: two guys who were mostly talking about something other than their studies; and two gals, one with a sticker on her laptop that read, “All I need is coffee and Jesus.”
K and I are more than acquaintances, less than friends. She’d reached out because she’s on the brink of starting a new business for herself and she’s overwhelmed at the process. She remembered I’m part of Blackletter, a branding agency here in Columbus, and thought I might be able to help her clarify how to go about this exciting, daunting, complicated task of building a brand from the ground up. She asked me directly, “How do I do this?”
We talked about her background, her vision, her goals. Her market, her competition, her audience. I offered support where I could and resources where I couldn’t. My goal with K was to empower her so that she could see her new entrepreneurial landscape clearly and have a plan for navigating it with integrity. To her I was and will be a guide in discovering and telling the truth about her business. Aligning that truth with business practices. Expressing all of it in a compelling way. That’s what we do, branding consultants. We get our clients to the right solutions.
Most of our clients tell us that working with us feels more similar to therapy than anything else. That despite their expectation of slick slideshows and esoteric jargon, they were surprised to feel seen and heard.
“You asked hard questions and listened intently to understand who we are and what we care about,” says Charlotte Cohen, Executive Director of Brooklyn Arts Council. “It was quite an intimate experience—you helped us reframe our approach and it still plays out today in how we operate as an organization.”
This makes sense, of course, because when branding is done well, it doesn’t find its power in flashy presentations or rote-processes-that-worked-before-so-they’ll-definitely-work-for-you-and-we-can-prove-it-so-sit-down-and-hear-us.
Branding, when done well, is about listening.
Recently, I read Carey Smith’s article in Inc., entitled, “Keep Their Hands Off Your Brand” In it, Smith claims that hiring a branding and marketing consultant is a very bad idea and you should never do it. After reading the piece, I was so upset that I outlined the entire thing, revealing each claim’s logical fallacy (I found 14 separate such illogical claims). In what felt like a letter one would write about an unrequited love interest, Smith’s piece drags my profession through the mud using hasty generalizations, faulty analogies, and appeals to emotion alongside the manipulative tactics of hyperbole, oversimplification, and straight-up false accusations. His piece is deplete of the intellectual honesty I, and many in my profession, hold dear. It feels like a shameless display of spite in family court. The piece misrepresents as general that which was, at best, particular in his experience—and obviously quite personal.
Are there con artists in branding? Intellectual lightweights? Money-focused ideologues? Sure. There are people who are less than honest or thorough or integrated in everything—from branding to venture capitalists. But that doesn’t mean that all branding agencies or venture capitalists are bogus and unworthy.
“You asked hard questions and listened intently to understand who we are and what we care about. It was quite an intimate experience—you helped us reframe our approach and it still plays out today in how we operate as an organization.”
I’d like to respond to Smith directly by saying that I’m very sorry he had a bad experience with a branding agency in the past. Perhaps more than one bad experience or branding agency. But to disparage an entire profession based on a bad experience or two is irresponsible and dishonest. Moreover, to lay the full burden of brand building on the backs of business owners, (claiming his $500 million dollar success is due to “common sense”, which we all presumably possess), is insensitive, arrogant, and tone deaf. What a pressure to put on people. That would be like me telling K “just use your common sense” when she asked what steps she should take in this unfamiliar territory. She asked me because I’ve done this many, many times before—and with great success. She asked me because I absolutely love the work I do in discovering purpose with clients and then leading them in expressing it. She asked me because she wants to focus her talents and expertise on her professional purpose and have me focus my talents and expertise on mine.
Astute discernment on the part of the client is crucial to the success of a professional arrangement like the one involving a branding consultant. If the “common sense” to which Smith credits his blazing success also led him to hire the wrong firm once, twice, or more than that, I would encourage him to examine his hiring practices before casting judgment over an industry he misunderstands.
No, people should not always define and express their company brands by themselves. There are agencies out there with integrity and grit—people who will do a hundred revisions in relentless advance of “just right”—but you have to search for them. Sometimes the flashiest of stones isn’t gold after all.