How to Strategically Brand Your Clients' Businesses

Felipe Zorzi is the founder of Agencia GDM, a branding and inbound agency in Brazil. Before that he worked at global communication groups like WPP and BBDO, with a couple of years on the client side as a product manager at Veja, a Brazilian weekly magazine. Gray MacKenzie hosted and walked through GDM’s branding process step by step, from the pre-sales conversation to how the agency presents names and logos.

Helping friends name their companies beat finishing TV commercials

Felipe’s reason for starting GDM was simple. Friends kept asking for help with their own businesses.

Quite often I had friends of mine who were opening a business, or who had a business already, asking me questions like, what name should I give to my company or to my new product? Can you help me design my logo? And when I managed to help each one of these friends, I must say that I felt a lot of joy. It was like real happiness to me, and much more happiness than I felt when I finished a TV commercial or a print ad.

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At the end of 2013 he came across the Golden Circle concept, watched it something like a hundred times, and decided it was time. GDM now splits about 50-50 between branding projects, which last three or four months, and inbound and paid work that keeps clients for a year.

Step one happens before the sale: believe in the client’s business

Gray asked how a rebrand starts. Felipe’s answer began before the contract.

I would say that the step number one, before even start the partnership, would be to believe in the client’s business or the client’s idea, or I know that we won’t do a great job… I often ask the clients, why do you believe that your business are so relevant for the people? What kind of impact you are willing to cause?

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If the founder can’t convince him, he knows the project won’t go well. His current example was a large energy and infrastructure group in southern Brazil launching a wind power business. It’s all pre-sales, and after years of these conversations Felipe knows within the first 30 minutes.

GDM doesn’t do logos. Strategy comes first

When a company hires a branding project, they definitely looking for strategy, planning, good quality information… Otherwise, they would be hiring only a designer. Very often, the phone rings here at GDM with people asking us to create a logo, and I get back and say, we don’t do logo, we do a branding project. It’s quite different.

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Strategy starts with an immersion: a full week of interviews, run from a script with a startup’s founder, plus a workshop with the board of directors at an established company, then research into the competition and the category. The output is the why, how, and what; the brand manifesto; and the positioning, all inside a four-week sprint before any creative work. Without that, Felipe said, “the design output would be the same for any sort of company.”

Naming: 200 ideas, 20 on the wall, and the client removes the rest

For a startup, the first creative deliverable is the name. Felipe compares it to naming a child, and he wants the client in the room for it.

It’s crystal clear for us that we should bring the clients into this process from the very beginning… So, when it comes to presenting the name, for example, we print and paste all the names and its rationales on the wall here at the agency, and then the client decides which one stays on the wall and which one goes to the trash. So, he does that until he came up alone with the winner.

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It starts with an online briefing the client fills in, which becomes the creative team’s brief: the territories to own, descriptive or abstract. The creative team generates around 200 names, cuts them to 40 or 50, and an internal brainstorm lands on the final 20. Before the presentation, GDM checks three things on each name: whether a company in the same segment already uses it (if so, it’s withdrawn), whether the domain is available or what the workaround is, and a high-level search of Brazil’s trademark registry that shows a green, yellow, or red light.

Don’t overwhelm the client, and celebrate the approvals

Asked for his biggest lessons, Felipe gave two.

Pay attention to the amount of work you show to the client in every step. So, don’t present more than 20 naming options, and don’t present more than three logo options. So, don’t overwhelm them, basically… This is about leading the process, leading the client’s journey inside the agency, making them feel confident about their decision.

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On fun: agencies rarely celebrate their ideas becoming a real business, and the client should see that the team enjoys the work. Gray asked how that gets built in without feeling fake. Felipe joked that with the DoInbound system (the agency process platform Gray and Andrew Dymski ran at the time) they have a process for everything: when a name or logo is approved, a templated email from the manager on the job recaps what the client went through and sets up the next stage.

One part of it that is very important is to break the process into very small pieces. So, as I said, it’s a three-month project. So, it is important to have a weekly interaction with the clients during this whole period. So, the clients will feel that the work is flowing, you see things going on. So, we have this moment that we celebrate like a name approved or a logo approved.

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Gray said that was the biggest missing piece in GuavaBox’s early retainers: plenty of work in the back end, none of it communicated.