What should I look for in a branding and creative direction studio?

Ensuring your business leaves its mark on your audience is key, and it seems every entrepreneur, brand, and small business is launching a new product or service,  so it’s important that yours doesn't get lost in the noise. With access to a range of resources and information, the ability to launch products themselves, as well as having access to an influx in branding and marketing studios the options are endless. When you’re looking at who you want to launch your business, campaign, or product with, there are a few questions we recommend asking before committing to a studio. Then the question poses, should we just use AI and hope for the best?

What service do you actually need?

First things first, do you understand what you want? When seeking services its best to understand, do you need a photography, a branding architect, creative director, art director, or graphic designer. We’ve put it into simple terms for you.

You need someone to capture your vision, but know exactly what you want it to look like. You need a photographer.

Nothing ground breaking here. A photographer is what they say they are. They’ll capture amazing moments and produce high press quality imagery. The best thing to understand is if they work across product, food, lifestyle or fashion photography. The next question is, are they able to best understand your needs and creative direction or do they require your direction. It really just depends on how hands on you’ll looking to be as well as if you need further creative direction with the shoot.

You're venturing outside of your core brands assets and don’t know how to manage the expansion. You need a branding architect.

A branding architect understands your company's vision and explores ways that it can be managed to expand to a greater audience whilst still tying itself back to the roots of your business. Brand Architects manage the companies master brand, sub-brands, products, and services related to the business and is a great asset if your brand launches non-traditional products and engage in regular collaborations that allow for audience and brand expansion.

You have an amazing product but don’t know how to capture it? You need a creative or art director.

These are unfortunately seen as one in the same but both service different purposes. A Creative Director develops strategy, tone, and vision, whilst an art director translates those goals into specific visuals. Do the visuals work better with a specific graphic style, colour grading, visual effects, film pacing, or character styling. These are great if you know what your business wants to achieve, but are unsure how to convert that in to visuals

You’re covered for most things, but you need overall creative assistance and are price sensitive? You’re probably looking for a graphic designer.

The one size fits all solution. These days graphic designers are photographers, art directors, social media managers, videographers, and… graphic designers. We label graphic designers as creative assistants. They’re a one size fits all approach with a lower cost but generally have lesser experience in managing entire projects, although they’re usually great at executing them.

Do they understand your industry and what does their experience look like?

Hiring an employee that is green for lack of better words can prove to be an asset as you’re able to train them in the best way that works for your business. However, going external; these are things that should be established so they can give you the best possible direction and advice. Things to look out for are; whether they’ve provided similar services, their operational approach, their previous client database and most importantly, the person behind the project. 

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Making sure you and your selected studio are able to work together and feed off of one another allows for a longer relationship than one that may be perfect for one single job. It might not be the perfect portfolio, but if the person behind the studio can best understand your needs and you’re able to feed off of one another, that's the strongest asset a studio can have.

So should you use AI to develop your next brands campaign?

If you’re tight on budget yes, if you want to make sure your ideas are able to beyond what you can feed AI then no. AI in the 21st century is only going to get stronger, feeding off of ideas  that others have created, using previous information to best develop a strategy and vision for your upcoming project. The only issue is, that’s just the problem. If you’re unable to articulate your vision, then it’s best you see external HUMAN advice and direction, and if you’re unsure of why AI’s mockups and deliverables are falling short, then having an expert opinion is your level up on the competition. 

Curbside too utilises AI in their operations, but it’s not to generate content for our clients, but rather to help with our operations. Sourcing materials, generating references, deciding on the overall themes, styles, and graphic decisions we develop for our clients, however taking those references an creating clients portals and file databases, as well as generating or conceptualising moodboards, we leave for AI to do to free time for us to be able to invest more time in your project.

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