What to do if your brand strategy doesn't land with a client

What to do if your client doesn't like the brand strategy options you've presented

If a brand strategy doesn’t land with a client, don’t panic — in this video and blog we help you navigate the moment by digging into why it missed.  Common issues include:

• the idea being too ambitious (or not enough)
• personal bias from a dominant stakeholder
• misunderstanding what a brand strategy is
• misjudging whose voice really matters.

Ultimately, it’s about listening, adjusting, and supporting the client’s direction — it’s their brand, not yours.

Here's a transcript of this video:

Question:
"I'm curious, what happens if a proposition doesn't land well with the client? Not necessarily that they hate it, but that they're not sold on the proposition or they don't particularly like it. How would you navigate that?"

The first thing to say is that the 'navigate' word is exactly it. How do you navigate what happens next? Because it's not usually about blowing everything up and starting again. It's about finding your way through the issue that they've got.

So the first thing you've got to do - and you must do is not let that client out of the room until you've done this -  is have a really good discussion about why they don't like it, or schedule some time with them very shortly after that meeting to have a discussion about why they don't like it.

If you've run out of time in the meeting, you cannot let the client walk out the room in a really subjective way saying, "Oh, I just don't like it", or "No, that's not it." Those sort of comments give you nothing to work with. You are in trouble if you are just left with this generic sort of phrase about "I don't like it."

What are the reasons why clients don't like a strategy?

What can be underpinning their dislike of it is all sorts of issues - emotional issues, understanding issues, but you've really got to have a conversation about why they don't like it. In my experience - touchwood - this hasn't happened to me for about ten years, but for sure it's happened to me before -  I've presented something that didn't land, and I think there are some really common reasons why it doesn't land.

Where brand strategy goes wrong - sometimes you don't stretch far enough

The first one is connected to the brand strategy ladder - that ladder of ambition, particularly on the why statement. When you answer why the brand exists, sometimes it's perceived to be too far down that ladder. So they have a little bit more ambition than you're giving them credit for and you've just pitched it a little bit too low.

You've not talked to a bigger sense of purpose for the organization when they really genuinely want to have one. So sometimes it's just the pitching on that ladder and you get to this discussion about, well, it doesn't feel ambitious enough for us or stretching enough, and that's quite an easy fix. You go back to your work, you go back to your insight development. You go back to that ladder and you just push a bit harder about going higher up that ladder and to a bigger benefit area and a bigger  promise that this brand is making. And you take a couple of those back to them.

Now, sometimes what happens is they go, oh, that's  too ambitious. You were right in the first place. But sometimes they go, yes, we really want to be higher up. This is great. This is what we wanted. So sometimes it's a stretch issue.

Where brand strategy goes wrong - sometimes you stretch too far 

The other flip side of that is sometimes they don't like it because you stretch them too far. In that meeting it's really helpful to have a conversation around, if you're talking about this 'why' there are some implications. Let's start talking about what the implications of this might be. And that's where they may get uncomfortable, and they don't like it because they can't really deliver it. You've pushed them too far, you've gone too ambitious with what they're about. And this happened to me with Ernst & Young  -now known as EY - a long time ago. We presented this idea, which I really thought was right for them, and it was just too ambitious for them at that time. It was just too ambitious for the CEO.

Now, the next CEO actually went with exactly that idea, a good, like five, six years later. Sometimes it's just they're not ready for the idea. You've stretched them too far. You need to come back down the ladder to a sort of a more acceptable, safer place to them. And that is just about going back and playing with where should they be sitting on that ladder. So that's a very common thing, going too far, stretching them too far, or not stretching them far enough.

Where brand strategy goes wrong - sometimes it becomes too personal 

Another reason that it often doesn't land is the person you're talking to has a very clear idea in their head about what they want the answer to be.

Now, if you haven't run a workshop, this is where you can get slightly into trouble, because sometimes there's a very dominant voice in the room who believe they want their why or their values to be this thing. And actually it's not the right thing for many reasons that you can prove to them. Like, for instance, the competitors all talk about that idea, or all of the employees have said that this is one of the weaknesses of the organization. So it's just not a strong enough proposition to build upon. 

But if that person in the room is very dominant, and if you haven't had a chance like in the workshop where people have shared their ideas and other people have sort of said, I don't believe that's going to work, or they've not been challenged, then they can go in that room believing that their voice is the only voice that matters and their idea is the only one that matters. And they just have gone in with this mission of wanting to push that idea regardless of what you're presenting. In that instance, you need to have your backup. You need to come back with the backup about why that idea isn't right.

Or you may even need to run a workshop to road test a few ideas so that leader can hear from other people in the organization that they don't believe that's what the brand should be about. They're a sole, lone voice. So sometimes it can be an ego driven thing that whatever you present, they've got this idea in their mind and you haven't been able to surface it to that point, and that's all they want to stand for.And sometimes you have to work through those sorts of ego-driven barriers to getting sort of an idea decided.

And on that note, sometimes you've got to go with it.

Where brand strategy goes wrong - sometimes you take it too personally

If they don't like what you've presented and they have an idea and you've presented all the rationale why that idea isn't as strong and why you don't believe it's going to work,  you've got to sometimes just step back and go, you know what? This is not my brand. It's not my organization. It's theirs.

Fundamentally, with any strategy, it's just a choice. It's just a decision that they're taking. They can take a different decision and they can arguably build a really successful brand from it. So there is a point in the process where you have to adapt, where you can present things to the death, you can have rationale, reams of rationale and backup, but they just want to go for a direction. And in that case, you need to start supporting them and not fighting for too long.

You need to help that organization go,  "Okay, well, if this is the direction we're going, how do we align the rest of the strategy to make sure it works in the best way possible?"

So just make sure your ego isn't driving it too much. It's not your brand. And there is sometimes a point where whatever you think the best idea is, it's irrelevant. You have to go with the idea that the organization wants to pursue because it's their brand and it's their direction.

What else?

Where brand strategy goes wrong - sometimes they don't know what they are judging

So sometimes the reason a strategy doesn't land is because they don't really know what they're looking at. And this is a little bit of a failure in an upfront piece of the work. And this is why brand strategy process is so important.

If they don't understand fundamentally what a brand strategy is and if they really think it's just like a tagline, you can get into these awful debates where they're saying, oh, well, I don't like it because I can't imagine that on the end of an ad. And that's a failure of understanding what this process is and what you're trying to do to help them.

So then you have to go back and do a bit of education around "Okay, this is what a brand strategy is. Here's some examples from the best brands in the world. Here's what they look like. Here's how this gets translated into copy and taglines."

And you may even need to start that piece of the work to kind of backtrack into the strategy to show them that this is a tagline, this is copy, this is strategy, and have that debate with them.

So sometimes it's a failure of understanding what it is they're looking at. It's not that the idea is wrong, it's just that they haven't really understood what a brand strategy is. 

Where brand strategy goes wrong - sometimes you don't judge the room right

And then sometimes, and this is the last time this happened to me, ten years ago, it's very vivid in my mind because I presented this idea that I thought was so right to this organization. It was in a huge boardroom, a ballroom of a hotel, actually, and there were about 16 people I was presenting to. And I presented an idea and it landed like tumbleweed.

It was just like, no, and I was like, oh, my gosh, what have I got wrong? So what I'd got wrong in that instance was that I hadn't understood the weight of the voices in the room.

And this is particularly important when you're creating a new brand from scratch and you don't have customer insight or you've got very little customer insight. When it's a very founder-driven brand. In this case, you need to know whose voice it is that you should be listening to most. And in this case, when it didn't land for me,  I'd listened to the MD and the CEO and I hadn't listened to the chef enough. And it turned out really, in that meeting, that it was the chef's brand, it was not the MDs. It was not the CEOs. They were housing this restaurant I was working on.

And even though they were part owners, they just wanted to do what the chef wanted. So in that instance, what do you do? Well, this is why things like transcripts are really important.

The chef did not have more time to talk. He was trying to open this really expensive restaurant. He was absolutely swamped. So there was no time to go back and have another hour talking to him. It was about going back to the transcript I'd done from the interview with him and his sous chef and going back and really understanding, okay, this is what he wants the brand to be about, and this is what I've got to lead with. And that's how that project was saved and it led to so many other projects. So don't get too discouraged.

Final brand strategy tip - keep perspective

Also, if it doesn't land, don't worry. It's just a step in the process.

It's not the end of your good reputation! You can come back and present some other options. And I guess the last thing to say on this is, I think when you're new and starting out doing brand strategy, I'd really recommend you have at least a couple of options for the client on the table. I think as I've got older and as I've done this for many years, I feel super confident most of the time with one option. I've worked through all different scenarios. I can talk about them, but I go in with one generally. Now, I didn't do that in the beginning. I wasn't confident enough to do that in the beginning. I wasn't clear enough. And I think having a couple of options on the table allows this debate around what's right, what isn't, and it's probable that you may not land it first time.

And that's okay. It's a step in the process. But if you have options, then it doesn't feel like any sort of failure. It just feels like this is a conversation. We've talked about these couple of options. We know what's worked here and what hasn't worked here, and then you're doing your next iteration. So that's another thing you might want to consider when you're starting out doing brand strategy.

Hope this has helped. 

If you want to get clear and confident doing brand strategy for your clients Brand Strategy Academy is the answer. Find out more here.