Are You a Partner or a Vendor?

January 20, 2010 — Tiffani — 5 comments

Responding well to difficult client feedback is an epic challenge for design agencies. The situation is usually characterized as a side effect of “problem clients,” whose whims and idiosyncracies we must learn to delicately navigate. Unfortunately, this way of framing the issue masks a deeper, and more important problem: the fact that many clients aren’t sure whether the agency they’ve hired is a “vendor” or a “partner.”

Here, I’ll talk about the differences between the partners and vendors, and offer a few solutions to figuring out which category best describes your business.

The Difference Between Partner and Vendor

The difference between partners and vendors revolves around one central question: Does your agency simply fulfill job order specs handed to it via an RFP or per the client’s request, or does it actually help craft the strategy that drives the RFP or client’s requests? In other words, is your agency involved in critically thinking through the marketing and business objectives that determine what work should be done, or not?

If clients come to you for advice and look to you to help them work through strategy-related questions, you’re probably in the partner category. If clients come to you primarily for your technical expertise—your excellent command of photoshop, ability to pump out pixel-perfect XHTML, or unbelievable turnaround times—you might be in the vendor category.

Another way of putting it: Vendors carry out tasks (often beautifully, I should add). Partners help create the tasks, and then carry them out.

When Vendor Is Right

Although the way I’ve framed this conversation makes it seem like being in the vendor category might be bad, this is not necessarily true. Some businesses are built on a vendor framework: they usually know the scope of their projects, have a very crisp, predictable biz dev process, and pump out consistent work. Because their services are roughly the same from project to project, vendors are often nimble, expert craftsmen who are able to turn on a dime and accommodate last-minute changes and feature requests with ease. The same is not always true of partners.

When Vendor Is Wrong

Problems arise when agencies who’ve been hired for their web or communications strategy skills are treated like vendors. A common scenario for those in the partner category goes like this:

You’ve gone through a thorough strategy phase and helped your client discover the main problems with his website—the tone is off, the design doesn’t fit the branding strategy, and the user experience is poor. You’ve helped him create a strategy for his content, worked with him to generate high-level messages, made wireframes that display page-level requirements, and agreed on a look and feel for the design after submitting a round of moodboards. You’ve long-since signed the creative brief.

You’re halfway through template development, when suddenly your client (after talking with his boss or wife, let’s say) decides he wants to move everything on the home page around, change his concept for the blog, re-write the about page, and switch the colors on the whole site from orange to green. What happens next?

The difference between a vendor and a partner is, in some respects, the difference in how each gets treated in this situation. If you are treated as a vendor, your client will usually expect that you simply make the changes he requests—you can often (but not always) ask for a change order and add more to the budget if the changes are out of scope, but you probably won’t be invited to submit your opinion about the logic behind his decisions.

If you’re treated as a partner, it’s feasible that you can raise issues (beyond just budget and scope) with the changes. Do they make sense? Do they fit with your strategy? What business conditions caused your client’s boss/wife to suggest them? Are they really a good idea?

When Partner Is Right

Where you fit along the partner-vendor spectrum depends on what kind of ship you’re running, where your talents lie, and how well you tolerate and resolve uncertainty; when you start a strategy project or partner with a client, it’s not always clear where you’ll end up.

For our agency, partnering with clients is the definitive answer. We like high-level problem-solving about business goals and marketing strategy. We like the difficult conversations and back and forth it takes to come up with the right solution. We like helping our clients find new ways of communicating with their audience. Most of all, we like the long-term relationships that come from a partnering situation: clients come back to us for our opinions and advice, or to just think through a rough idea.

The same is not true for every agency. You may be more comfortable with a more clear cut, product-like rendering of your services, for example: you deliver the same wonderful thing every time, like a hot cup of coffee.

These days, it seems like every agency wants to be known as a strategy-oriented, problem-solving, critical thinking group of creatives. But I’m not sure this is actually true—there are just as many great reasons for being a “vendor” (as I’ve defined it here) as there are for being a “partner.” It all depends on your business model.

In my opinion, the trick is to spend a good deal of time discovering out where you fit along this spectrum. Then, you must communicate your decision clearly to clients, so they hire you for services you actually offer, have reasonable expectations about what you will and will not do, and respect your way of working.

2009 To 2010

December 31, 2009 — Tiffani — 5 comments

2009

It’s been a Bubblicious year for Matt and me. In July, I left my good job at Blue Flavor, joined thingsthatarebrown, and started my own business. Since August, I’ve finished 18 projects of various sizes and written four articles. Matt worked his face off, completing over 26 projects, speaking, attending conferences, and writing — thingsthatarebrown has grown furiously.

In the personal sphere, we went on seven big trips, bought our first car, and got married. Matt took up boxing. I dabbled in trapeze.

As I mentioned in a Second and Park blog post, we have been fortunate. We’ve got good friends and supportive colleagues cheering us on. Our families like us. The recession didn’t bash our business in. Working together has actually brought us closer, rather than straining our marriage (as many suspected it would).

Still, there are some things we sucked at. We didn’t cook enough, and didn’t allow enough time for making and seeing art. I said yes to way too many projects. We didn’t always begin and end our days crisply. But hey—bygones.

2010

Next year, we want to take things up a notch. Our #1 goal is to seriously improve our thingsthatarebrown work and grow into a deeper, better agency. We want our work and process to more accurately represent our tastes and talents. We want to collaborate more. Here’s how we plan on doing it:

Reposition thingsthatarebrown. This year, we’re rolling out new services and refining our process. Instead of focusing on design, templates and development, we’ll be focusing on strategy, art direction, copywriting, and design. In other words, TTAB is no longer one guy cranking out IA and design. It’s the both of us, focusing on really solving our clients problems and helping them communicate the right message. This critical thinking-heavy, strategy-not-tactics approach is what we’re good at, and what we like.

Rethink Second and Park. Second and Park has been an unexpected and fast success, but it can’t be my full-time job. A while back, I wrote that copy is not enough—meaning that it takes strategy and copy and design to really get the right message across. Accordingly, I’ll be doing most of my copy and strategy work in conjunction with design projects this year, and therefore spending more time at thingsthatarebrown.

More and Better Writing. This is our pet project. The brown blog is nowhere near what we think it can be, and we plan to fix that. Expect us to complete our thoughts, pursue ideas further, post more often, and write articles and how-to’s in addition to regular old posts.

More Speaking. I’m speaking at SXSW and both Matt and I are speaking at Microsoft Mix10, so we’ve already beat last year’s record—but it would be really nice if we could find one more conference in, say, Paris or Berlin to speak at. Just to keep it mixxy.

More Art. This means more art of every kind in our work and lives. Our refined strategy and discovery phases will reflect this thinking, as will the little choices we make daily about how we spend our time. And yes: by art I do mean the standard menu of museums, music, flights of fancy, and books.

More Travel. If all goes well, we’ll squeeze in some quality overseas time. Eventually we want to live overseas part-time; this year is our trial run.

Fewer Projects. We simply can’t meet our goals and take on the project load we did in 2009. So, it’s fewer yesses and projects for us in 2010.

Remember What We’re About. In addition to wanting freedom and flexibility, we started our companies because we think that good, honest communication makes businesses better and more exciting.That’s what our writing and design are about. We’ll try to keep this thinking front and center as we tumble through next year. Thanks to Howard Mann for framing the concept.

And that’s it! We hope you have a happy 2010, and that you feel clear and energized the whole time. If you’ve got any goals or inspiration you’d like to share, feel free to bring that ruckus here.

Introducing WhichDigi.com

December 17, 2009 — Matt — leave a comment?

Just a formal note about a site I launched a bit ago: WhichDigi?http://whichdigi.com. It’s just a simple microsite to help people decide which type of entry-level camera to purchase.

The concept was to cut through the overloading of technical information surrounding digital cameras, with some simple and direct advice. Just spend a few hours on a site like Digital Photography Review, and you’ll quickly realize that having all the information possible, doesn’t make it easier to make a decision — especially for those new to photography.

which-digi

Not that simple

Designing this site was easy. I’d been itching to make a very visual, simple product pitch page, and this project gave me a great avenue for that — big, juicy, product photography with dramatic rollovers. Hoo-ha, I’m in heaven.

Writing the actual copy and coming up with a strategy for the site — that was difficult. My hat goes off to any copywriter or agency who has to tackle how to market and promote a modern camera. It’s unbelievably painful. You see, digital cameras are just little black boxes packed so densely with technology, it’s amazing they can function at all.

But how do you market pure technology? All these cameras have roughly the same feature sets. They all take mostly the same quality of picture (for type, price range). They nearly all look identical.

Give benefits

I was lucky enough to have Tiffani around to help to sort through the copy dilemma. Originally, I had resorted to the crutch of listing features like “this camera has xxx sensor that blah blah blah”. Obvously, this is a flawed approach — who cares? To list a feature presumes that the reader can translate that into a reason to care. One should never place the burden on the customer to understand why they’d benefit from a feature.

So we scratched our Marketing 101 itch, and came up with a list of benefits to pitch these cameras on — what does each camera do that makes a user’s life easier, or photos better. Focusing on benefits also helped me articulate why I thought these cameras stood out — in a crowded market, they offer some real-world benefits to beginning photographers.

Anyhow, just a little insight into how complicated and challenging even a ‘little’ project can be. Strategy and writing are always the most important elements of any project — even if they’re the most difficult.

Share the love

In the new year, I’ll expand the site a bit, recommend a few other camera types, and give some links to photo resources for beginners. It’s still a work in progress.

However, if you know of anyone looking for a new digital camera, pass ‘em the link. Both are solid, unique cameras that offer an awesome value for the money.


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