Land on nearly any agency homepage these days and the first two words you'll see are almost guaranteed to be “We are…” followed by the agency name.
It seems ‘we’ just cant help ourselves. ‘We’ are so desperate to let you know who ‘we’ are and what’s so different about ‘us’ that ‘we’ are all starting to sound the pretty similar!
I’m not suggesting for one minute that a sense of identity or a manifesto are bad things, au contraire mon brave, ‘we’ certainly have ours, plus, it’s important to feel like both sides share some common values. But, I think such a stance so early in a relationship runs the risk of stamping an agency’s identity over the top of the client’s needs, leading to style-driven solutions over insight-led work. A slippery path.
Uh-oh, now I'm going to have to use the w-word… We (voyage.) believe that listening rather than talking opens the door to brave, meaningful and authentic positioning and messaging. Our output should be less about us and all about you – it’s this thinking and approach that has resulted in work like our branding for Siren and St Paul’s (to name just two).
Both required a keen ear just as much as they needed a trained eye. In the first case to reveal a deep rooted motivation and in the second to unravel a complex conundrum.
So, if working with an agency interested in working out who you are, and how best to communicate that to your audience sounds interesting… well, you know where ‘we are’.