on Clients
Learning what they’re really buying
I’ve been hearing the same complaints about clients for as long as we’ve been running the studio. You’ve probably heard them too.
“Clients want pitches. Clients want more options. Clients want to make changes again. Clients don’t know what they want. Clients have no taste. Clients design by committee until the whole thing turns to soup.”
The conversation hasn’t moved an inch between 2005 and 2026. It’s still framed as an adversarial relationship where the creative knows better and the client is out to ruin the work. The funny thing is, look closely and every one of these complaints comes down to the same thing: decision-making is hard, and no one wants to be the one who got it wrong.
It may not seem obvious, given how often we talk about them like a separate species, but clients are human. And humans are not, on the whole, gifted at making decisions. All decision-making is influenced by emotion, mostly by how we’re wired to fear losses more than we value gains. And most “difficult” client behaviour is just someone trying to avoid future pain, in a Monday meeting, a performance review, or whatever room they’ll eventually have to explain the project in.
Which is also a clue for how to present your work.
A while back, we worked on a brand identity project. The concept was approved, everyone loved it, and we submitted our invoice for the identity phase before moving on to the brand guidelines. Instead, the project manager came back asking for additional brand colours. I replied that there was no need and that the identity worked best in black and white. Adding more colours would only compete with the product instead of supporting it.
The emails went back and forth a few times until eventually I was told we wouldn’t get paid unless we provided more brand colours (this is what happens when a client thinks they have leverage and decides to hang the invoice over the conversation like a chandelier). So I stopped talking about design. Instead I put together a colour chart showing how every possible colour carried a different risk. One was associated with a political party, another with the military, another with a progressive movement. Every colour increased the chance that someone would associate the brand with something we never intended.
The identity stayed black and white.
On the same project, our contract required us to present two identity concepts. The challenge was we’d already found a solution that fit the strategy and worked for the audience. I could have invented a second direction to fulfil the contract, but a second direction is a live idea, and live ideas have a way of getting chosen (or of multiplying). Give someone two options and they might ask for a third. Give them five and they can’t decide between any of them. More choice doesn’t make deciding easier. It just moves the finish line further and further away.
So instead of two options, I presented all the possible directions anyone could think of, explained why each one would fail, and systematically eliminated them until only one remained. No one asked where the second option was.
What clients want, often, is to be able to say, and show, if anyone asks, that they did the work. “I scrutinised hundreds of options and picked the best one” sounds a lot more impressive than “I went with the one idea they presented and I nodded.” Options are both an insurance policy and proof of work.
One last example. I was once brought on by the president of global creative for a brand to launch their flagship store. The work had to be presented to the local marketing team, the local operations team, then the regional marketing team, then the global marketing team, before finally reaching the chairman. I presented the same deck seven times. Seven.
Every group had comments. They wanted their fingerprints on the work somewhere. There’s an unspoken rule about meetings: if you’ve been invited, you’re expected to make something “better”. So somebody always finds something, whether or not they really understand what they’re looking at. The font’s too small… I’m not feeling this colour… Is this idea too edgy for our brand.. Is it too safe for our brand? Say nothing in a meeting and you might as well have stayed at your desk, and no one wants to be the person who contributed nothing. So in the end, the work became exactly what everyone complains about. Soup.
The chairman rejected the entire thing.
The next day, the president of global creative called me into his office and asked, in a less polite version of “what the hell happened?”, I explained the process and he said, “Tell them you’ll report directly to me from now on.” After that, the comments stopped. We went back to the original work. Nothing had changed, only whose name was on the decision if anyone asked.
Most of what looks like bad taste, indecision, or a hunger for options is just someone doing the mental sum on what this might cost them if someone asked. No one wants to be the only person in the room defending a decision everyone else had no part in making. It’s safer if everyone’s changed something, a sentence in the strategy or a colour or a font, however small. It turns a decision made for them into a decision made by them. Which is exactly how soup is made. A dish no one is fully responsible for because everyone’s had a hand in it.
A surprisingly large part of the job is sensing the dangers your client might face after you’ve left the room, and helping them navigate those dangers so they feel safe standing behind the idea.
So we’re basically in the insurance business and just happen to do design as well.
—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous
@felix.anonymous