Everyone loves a neat portfolio, but that’s just the ending. When hiring a branding agency, you may want to take a look behind the scenes.

When a brand decides to pick and hire a branding agency, they usually look at the portfolio. It makes total sense: a portfolio gives you a quick understanding of the style and standard of the agency.

For branding agencies and designers, a good portfolio is a vital tool to stay in business, and also a source of pride. I admit to spending an inordinate amount of time making sure Sublimio’s portfolio is always in good shape.

But portfolios only tell you a part of the story: the ending. And if you ever worked on a branding project, you know the journey can be just as interesting.

Why we started showing potential branding clients our “behind the scenes”

For a long time, we have been approaching potential clients the same way most branding agencies do: sending over our portfolio and a price estimate. 

But Sublimio doesn’t just send out portfolios: we receive them. Specifically, I receive portfolios from designers that would like to work with us. We are a small team by design, so this usually doesn’t evolve into a collaboration, but I come across a few portfolios that make me want to know more.

And by knowing more I mean understanding how they got to the results I’m seeing. What was the thinking, what roadblocks they hit and how they went around them. What was the process?

And then it hit me: we had never shared this with our own potential clients. They had been looking at a curated selection of beautiful case studies, but they had never been admitted behind the curtain.

So we started, as an experiment. Besides the portfolio, we began sharing parts of our process: excerpts from presentations that tracked the evolution of the work (of course this was done anonymizing as much as possible and with a green light from the clients themselves).

How seeing the process can help you hire the right branding agency

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After experimenting with this approach a little bit, I can tell you why potential clients find it valuable – and why you may want to ask your potential agency to share it with you.

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See how deep the thinking goes
You don’t usually hire a branding agency just because they create pretty things. Of course that’s important – and quite a big part of the overall decision – but branding projects should have a broader horizon. Some deeper thinking is in order. But strategy is usually not self-evident, and the way it was presented to the client is probably the best way to fully understand it.

‎See how broad the thinking goes
Is the agency a one-trick-pony or is it eclectic? When providing alternatives, are they truly varied and different? This is very important: once you are working with a branding agency, you don’t want to find yourself tied to a monolithic vision. Sure, every agency has its own approach, but that should be flexible enough to serve the brand. This can be partly appreciated through the portfolio, but even more so looking at the proposals that didn’t make it.

‎Have a preview of your overall customer experience
When you work with a branding agency, most of your customer experience is made of exchanges of ideas, in one form or the other. Is the agency able to communicate its ideas well? Do they care that the client understands them deeply or not? In the long run, this level of “flow” can be just as important as the quality of the work, and looking at process documents will give you a fairly good idea of how it’s going to be.

‎See how conflict is managed
Every agency will present itself as collaborative, but the real challenge is what happens when the clients push back on something. Does this make the work spiral or get better? Is the agency capable of taking feedback without going astray?

What can you really expect a branding agency to share with you

I think you might find the idea of looking behind the scenes fascinating, but we should also be honest about what can and can not be shared.

As I said before, all the material we share is anonymized if necessary and agreed with the clients. Nonetheless, there are some types of materials that are not for sharing.

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Any NDA-related content
The most obvious. Some branding projects are NDA covered, and while the NDA could have expired by then, expect the agency to be cautious about sharing them.

‎Pending proposals
Ideas in presentation decks could have been approved or discarded. Or they could live in a grey zone: not approved yet, but still viable. This won’t apply to a logo, of course, but could be true of a payoff or a specific brand initiative. We wouldn’t share those, don’t necessarily expect an agency to do so.

‎Slides that reference business strategy
Good branding work can sometimes extend into business strategy, or reference it. While there is no harm in sharing the rationale behind a name, exposing a company’s inner workings is a more sensitive affair.

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On the other hand, there are some other types of content that a branding agency can safely share with you:

• logo / naming proposals with their rationale
• logo process / construction slides
• strategic introductions 
• benchmarks and moodboards

Next time you are looking for a branding agency, try asking whether they could share some of these with you. Maybe they will like the idea, too.

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