The Eyelet.

You have invested a substantial amount of money in not only creative development but also media. Three months after starting the campaign, your sales aren’t up. It immediately appears like the creative didn’t work, so you’re on the phone scrambling to either change creative or your media mix.
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A few months back I was leading a brand workshop for one of our clients as part of a corporate rebranding program. This particular workshop involved associates directly at the front of the client relationship: folks who either directly faced the client or provided work product for those who did. After moving through about half of our planned exercises, one of the participants remarked, “Management can do whatever they want, this won’t change my job.”

After removing my jaw from the floor, I realized how much work we had to do in building a compelling brand experience for this particular client. And, yet it reminded me that one of the larger misconceptions of branding is that it starts and stops with the marketing department. At Mlicki, we can’t think of any bigger misunderstanding than that.

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Anyone who has ever stepped foot in our conference room has seen the rules we live by broken down into small digestible snippets of information. One of our personal favorites is “Saying very little, often speaks volumes.” In other words, simpler is sometimes better.

Part of what we do when starting a project is break it down to its simplest form and begin there. Whether it’s the brand thinking behind a logo or the theme that underlies a corporate brochure, the ability to communicate a complicated message in a simple manner is a hallmark of a great designer. Or illustrator. Or actor. Or quarterback. Or pilot. Or anyone, really.
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