Making brands more distinctive

Summer is over and the lazy days of the team gazing into a Mediterranean sunset whilst sipping an ice cold beer and ordering another side of calamari are long gone. To prove the point the last month has seen us deliver our quickest ever website design and development project. And it wasn’t even for an existing client so we had to get up to speed pretty quickly.

Delivering a project from a standing start for a new client in super-quick, on-budget, on-time style is always an interesting situation for an agency. You need to have a “can-do” attitude but we also need to be realistic and make sure that what the client wants and what we promise can be delivered. And delivered well.

There’s an old adage that says the client can’t have everything and that you must choose only two of the holy triumvirate of fast, cheap and good.  It’s a good reminder that cheap and fast may lead to an inferior product. While we’re at cheesy sayings another of my favourites is Red Adair’s famous “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur “.  As an aside, a year or so ago we had a potential client turn us down as an agency of choice because he had a cheaper supplier. No problem, it’s part of the business we’re in. But we’re never going to want to be appointed on the basis of simply being the lowest bidder anyway. He then had the gall to ask us if we’d review the work that he’d had done by the cheapo option and advise him if we thought if it was up to our standards! We politely declined but had a sneak peak and saw that, sadly, he’d been sold a pup.

Anyway, back to the website. We developed a plan with the client based on what could be delivered within the timeframe and budget with quality and creative integrity being the one area that couldn’t be sacrificed on the altar of quick and cheap – a process of give and take between us and the client that allowed for genuinely deliverable goals that everyone was happy with.

So, “can-do” needs to be balanced with due-diligence, honesty about the potential pitfalls of moving fast along with realistic goal and budget setting. It works for us and what could be a stressful job actually turned out to be a rewarding project completed in double quick time. A great start to a new relationship.

I’ll unveil the new website next month at www.frontideas.com

Joe