S07.EP08 - Why Most Agencies Sound The Same + How to Really Differentiate with Emily Penny

0:00I have a mantra of my own, which is don't be noisy, be interesting. It's about not being dull. It's about showing up as interesting and interesting might mean relevant for clients or different to all of the other candidates. But it's also about not wasting your energy on just spamming your audience.

0:26Emily Penny:Hello and welcome to Just Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Kass and Matt Davies.

0:46Before we jump in, if you're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you'll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault, and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you're done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the wait list. That's joinbba.com. Hi, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Just Branding. Today, we have the wonderful Emily Penney on with us. We're going to be talking about how the world really has started to feel very saturated, particularly in the agency world.

1:36A lot of agencies look, sound, feel very similar. So what do we do about that? We love to talk as brand builders about differentiation, but then it's like a plumber, I always think. You know, the plumber's house has always got pipes that are leaking, and it's kind of like us in this world. So this is for you. If you're building an agency, if you're running a creative agency, if you're a brand builder offering this, you know, services for brand building out in the wild, we are going to tuck into this because Emily is a brand strategist specializing in positioning and verbal identity. tea. She's the creator of a really interesting report that I think came out last year, didn't it, Emily?

2:14That's right, yes. And it was called Fully Saturated, and we're going to tuck into this. It explored how agencies are really navigating an increasingly crowded marketplace. Another couple of few facts about Emily is that she runs her own micro studio in the UK and has developed the brand strand positioning framework, helping brands find clarity in how they show up and communicate. And I'm hoping we'll be able to get some time to tuck into that also at the back end. A little unknown fact is that, Emily, I think we've worked together on a couple of projects quite a few years ago. So, you know, it's lovely to see you again.

2:53It's a delight. It's always a delight, Matt. Yes, he has to say that. You're a star guest. You can come again. Cool. Well, look, you know, I've obviously given a bit of an overview there and welcome to the show. But perhaps it would be great to hear about, you know, yourself in your own words. Like, who are you and what do you do? And most importantly, why do you do it, Emily? Well, I've been in the world of design for forever, really, for over 25 years. So I've been on the inside at agencies in London. I spent a good 15 years at London agencies before starting Be Colorful, which is my own Brand Voice studio.

3:31And I love that world. And I decided to focus on working with agencies, studios and consultants of all sizes to actually help them to think about brands. Because as you said, sort of what's so interesting is that this is what we do. This is what design agencies do for their clients, but somehow it doesn't apply to them, you know. And it's interesting that you kind of made a comparison with plumbers because plumbers are traders. There is commodity service. It's rare that you get a plumber who is really differentiated and really using brand to their advantage. And I kind of feel like design is going that direction.

4:14I want us to think more broadly than just delivering a commodity service. Exciting. So why did you get into that? Like, what was it that you think you personally connected with, like emotionally, I guess, behind it? Because I know you're very passionate for improving things. So what do you think has driven that? I think I've worked with hundreds of consultants and studios and agencies. And after a while, you start to see some patterns. And when you're kind of doing your 20th competitor audit, looking at the same landscape, the same familiar faces, you start to think kind of what's going on here and also why.

4:52I've seen several AI powered competitor audits looking at the design and agency landscape, but what they don't do is dig into the reasons why agencies are all showing up in a very similar way. And so we wanted to, this is Joel Stein and myself, we collaborated on this project we started talking about this as kind of therapy for a whole sector because we went out there and we spoke to agencies and people in in the design world to find out you know why is this happening everybody knows it's happening we're not this isn't news but but why what are the obstacles because if we can name those obstacles then perhaps that's the first step in getting over them yeah let's not deny there's an issue here let's confront it and move on so tell us about your connection with joel as well because i know both of you partnered on this as you mentioned and we did invite him on but he's a bit poorly today so sending love to joel if he's listening in but tell us what sort of brought about this report the background what inspired you to partner with joel to get on with it and what really was it what was the idea behind it well be colorful is i call it an agency that's not an agency i mean it's essentially me but i bring in brilliant other independent practitioners, writers, strategists, and others to work with me.

6:12Joel's been working with me for at least two years now. We had worked together on some of my agency clients. And that's when we had the idea to do the report, dig deep on the UK market. We couldn't do global, not quite yet. We had to sort of draw some boundaries. I know, you know, we both know the UK design industry. So we decided to start there. And we spent probably about four or five months just looking at hundreds, literally hundreds of design agency websites and asking people in the sector as well for their suggestions, who's caught their eye, who's doing something interesting. And our mission really was to find agencies that were truly treating their business as a brand.

7:03And we didn't want to do this as a big critical exercise where we're saying, you're doing it wrong, you're doing it wrong. Because what's more interesting is to unearth some of the lesser known examples that are actually really interesting and inspiring. So we looked far and wide. We've got examples from Glasgow to Brighton and everywhere in between. It's not just the usual big London agency familiar names. And even though you focused on the UK market, you know, obviously, like from my experience, like working across the borders, I often find it's very similar to this idea that you've said that everyone does have a little sort of very similar look and feel.

7:46Jacob, would you say that's the same with your experience? I wouldn't say look and feel, but I haven't done that much extensive work. I do know some of the messaging sounds similar. I do think the work on agency websites make them stand out in a different way, but how they talk about their services I notice is similar in that regard. yeah yeah i think more recently the sector has learned a lot from tech product marketing both for for good and and for bad really and certainly that's put more of the focus on kind of productization and selling points and talking about customer pain points and all those good practice things but i think what can get lost in the mix there is that if everybody's speaking to the same pain points.

8:37And this is kind of true in every sector. It still all sounds the same because everybody's promising to solve the same problems. I've worked with four US agencies now. And it's interesting to go into that market where I'm less familiar with the competitor set. But yeah, certainly I see very similar issues. And one of the things is, I guess, just copying the leaders you know people see what's working for the big agencies and they think oh well we'll do that but it's you know what works for them yeah that's that's the challenge right it's like you see these big brands and it's working but it's not necessarily something you can copy but i was going to mention like i think the angle that you bring to how you go about things so for example if your specialty is environment branding or if it's in web or digital, the lens that you bring, it kind of changes it a little bit with, even though it's like similar customer pain points, if you're talking about what your specialty is, that is how you can differentiate a little bit.

9:42And that's what I've noticed recently. So I haven't read your report yet. So I'm really curious about like what you found from it, especially when you compare different, I guess, lenses. And talking about lenses, we've asked this same question on Just Branding, the podcast, like what does branding mean to you? How do you define it? And everyone has a different answer. I mean, as with most things in this profession, I try and bring simplicity to it. And for me, brand simply means trust. If you swap out the word brand for trust in most cases, it will bring more meaning to what you're talking about.

10:23And positioning simply means focus. So if we bear those two ideas in mind, that actually all we're trying to do here is build trust and find focus, those are two very simple ideas that people can grab hold of. And, you know, we don't have to go into a whole kind of lexicon of jargon. And those are the ideas that are the foundations for how I work. I love that. Build trust and find focus. It's such a simple lens to look at through brand. And with, sorry, I can talk at length on this. Yeah, well, that's why you're here. Yeah, when we talk about focus, then we get into this whole discussion around, should you niche?

11:10Niching can be done around a vertical sector, which actually works really well because it's very easy to communicate. And that can work brilliantly for agencies. There are agencies that focus on alcoholic drinks or the art or B2B or whatever it is. That works brilliantly. But the big thing for me is that there are lots of other ways to focus. So it doesn't have, that's just one strategy. And this is where the Brandstrand framework comes in because that offers you 18 different positioning strategies. Just one of them is vertical niching. So can I just ask you around focus and niching? Because how do you see the difference between a focus or a niche?

11:56When people say niching, they tend to mean vertical sector niching. You decide that you are going to work for a particular sector, whereas lots of agencies don't actually want to do that. They want to bring a different kind of focus to the table. And what we're trying to do here is be memorable, be known for something instead of everything. So something has to be amplified. Something has to kind of go to the surface and be that simple idea that you want to be famous for. So, for instance, there's a brilliant studio called Analog whose mantra is seriously playful. They're owning the idea of play and being playful and it runs through everything they do.

12:47It runs through their product offers, their language, their visual identity. And similarly, there's a small studio down in Brighton called Crush and their mantra is honour the craft. and while craft is a pretty general term in the world of design they've gone all in they they own it everything they say ladders down from the idea of craft so emily to kind of just summarize here so the positioning is one thing where it's like it could be about playfulness and craft whereas the niche you're saying often people talk about the vertical niche my understanding in terms of there's many ways you can do that, whether it be location or size or budget or industry or service.

13:34There's many different ways to cut that pie. And then thirdly, we have the focus side of things. I'm just trying to understand the differences of the focus and the niche and the position. Are you saying the focus is kind of like the position or how are you splitting that up? I think the easiest way to think about it is that your focus is the simple idea that you want to be famous for. And that's the point of branding at the end of the day. It's to lay some groundwork so that when you're having those sales conversations, there's already some perception, some knowledge of you in the market, which might have been communicated with thought leadership or events or any channel really can help you build your brand.

14:24I mean, PR is a great example, for example. If there's no point just going out there and just trying to get PR coverage, because it won't compound unless there's a theme running through and you're actually trying to build this sense that you are the agency with a particular point of view. And that's when it becomes brand building and worthwhile. It's kind of risky, isn't it? This idea of focus and positioning and because you kind of feel like look there's a lovely thousands of opportunities out there and and and you know you're asking me to to double down and just to just a handful like that just feels like i'm leaving stuff on the table but the truth is then as you say the problem with with that attitude is that you become one one of many don't you you become you're in a sea of sameness i guess in your language of your report you know you're part of the saturation of the market, right?

15:19So to focus does enable you to win for those specific clients that you're looking for, which is what brand strategy is all about, isn't it really? Completely. It is scary. And that is definitely one of the big reasons why agencies aren't doing it. And they're not taking that risk to treat the business as a brand. It's because of the fragility of the market. and it's because of fear. It comes down to fear. I think it also comes down to the character of designers who are running businesses. Designers are really sensitive souls who overthink things quite a lot and that's part of the job. But that can be quite paralyzing when you come to making those tricky decisions.

16:08If you're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you'll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault, and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you're done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the wait list. That's joinbba.com. Like in my mastermind, I've got people that specialize and different things. So we've got one agency in Canada and they specialize, how about this, right?

16:49In the agricultural sector, which makes sense in Canada, right? Because it's vast swathes of land. But who would have thought that an agency could specialize and thrive in that sector? And then I remember I did some work a few years ago with an agency that were very generalist and they asked me to come in and basically do a brand strategy for them. And we looked at their top customer base and we found that actually a lot of their top customers were in the pharmaceutical sector and they weren't actually doing creative work for them. They were actually helping with their internal learning and development and their sales enablement.

17:21Now, after quite a bit of work, we repositioned them to literally just focus on the pharmaceutical industry and sales enablement and sales training. And they are now absolutely thriving. So that's just a couple of examples. And I'm sure you've got loads more. But this idea of focus and niching and just if we can just get over potentially that fear, that's something. But then the other thing, like you were saying, it doesn't have to be on a vertical. It could be on a theme. Myself, I talk about alignment, right? That's my thing, like personally. So I like to sort of try and sell that in so that when leaders are coming to me, they're coming because they're misaligned and they know they need some help.

18:06And I put that brand strategy lens into their leadership team. So that's kind of how I do it. How do you do it, Jacob? What would you say your sort of focus area is? I also go with alignment, actually. That's kind of, it makes sense because when things are out of alignment, it's like, well, it just doesn't work. So you have to realign things and get them aligned as much as possible. So that's the same approach. So you two are going to have to think about how you differentiate from each other then. Well, I don't think we lead with alignment. It's just how we talk about it internally. I think the external comms is vastly different.

18:40Like we have our own positioning. Matt is a brand consultant, a solo. I kind of lean into a mascot of stand the flock out. And everyone's talking about standing out. And that's why I was kind of interested to hear this because a lot of the language is like stand out, be different. But like how do you put a new spin on that? The flamingo is one way of doing that. You know, stand the flock out and the language and the vocabulary that comes with that also helps. But it doesn't lean into play or craft or like a big idea like that, which I thought was quite interesting. Yeah. There's an agency in New York that you might have heard of called Giza and their tagline is older, faster, better.

19:23So they're owning the fact that their team is made up of over 50s people and that that has advantages and they're making a virtue of that. And these are the kind of examples that we're trying to bring to the fore. We're trying to show that you can stand for unexpected things. I think a lot of agencies fall into the trap of simply describing what the profession does, what design does. And what I'm interested in is how is your brand different within that world or distinctive? And for instance, there's a small studio called Art Is My Career up in Newcastle, I think. And she's set up her business as a community interest company, which means that she has to produce an impact report every year.

20:12And we see agencies calling for brave thinking. For me, that is super brave. That's really walking the talk. That's saying I'm here to do positive impact work and I'm actually going to be a not for profit and create an impact report. So that was a really interesting one because it starts with the entity itself. Yeah, that's really interesting, like a structural change in the way that that's been set up, which is different. Amazing. Well, look, I wanted to kind of get us back into that report and just kind of get your initial kind of thoughts around themes and trends that you found. I mean, did you find the vast majority of agencies were all very similar?

20:51And obviously, you've referenced some of the outliers. Or did you actually find when you scraped the surface, there was actually differentiating positions and they became clear over the course of the research? We looked at hundreds and hundreds of agencies. We narrowed it down to 150 to order in detail. I'd say that probably a good three quarters of those were not really very noteworthy. We were looking for three things. We were looking for an angle that they brought to the sector. We were looking for relevance for their target clients and we were looking for memorability. So we went through every example and kind of scored them on that heuristic.

21:34we came up with our own top 25 showcase and the the examples that we've shown there are all have something truly remarkable about them and they are very very different to each other as well which is the other really important thing among equals was in there with their brilliant line start with no one cares. And we had, you know, obviously analog with seriously playful. We had some big agencies as well. We included one HQ on their website. They say, I love this. What we do isn't different. How you feel when you work with us is. Nice. And when you think about this kind of best practice dominant approach right now about kind of constantly blasting the audience with outcomes and promises of change and transformation, et cetera.

22:30Actually, they've stood back and said, actually, it's not about the outcome. It's about the process and the relationship. But I thought that was quite interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. I think that is another amazing way you can think about it. I sometimes use an example when I'm talking to my clients of like, say you're a hairdresser, right, on a typical high street, right? You go to a hairdresser, everybody's going to deliver the same outcome in some way, which ultimately would be a haircut. But the way that you do that can change. So you go into one salon and it could be like hard rock playing and really kind of grungy kind of people and like loads of stuff on the walls and black and I know crazy stuff.

23:07Go into another one, it's like got classical music playing and it's really sophisticated and someone hands you a glass of champagne and you sit down. These are very different approaches to deliver a similar service. The way that you do it, the how can make all the difference. And yet an awful lot of agencies and studios are simply saying we cut hair. We do design. You know, when I do workshops with agencies, I can tell you that every single agency thinks they are more strategic and deliver a higher level of craft and care more about their work. They all say that that is what makes them different.

23:48It's the better trap. from the inside they believe that they think we care so deeply about our work and i know they do and designers do and they're a fantastic bunch of people because of that but you can't simply explain what design is and what what design does to be a brand you need to add another layer so it's i like to think of it as layers you know we've got your basic information your basic credentials then we need to frame that as a proposition. Why is that valuable to your customer? But let's push further than that. Let's get a point of view. Let's have maybe a provocative, challenging point of view on the sector.

24:29That's something that enables you to have interesting conversations rather than just keep showing up and selling. This is where this kind of triangle of PR and socials and web, you know, you want your point of view kind of bouncing around that triangle. and that's how you start to have conversations rather than just selling. I think it's so ironic because as consultants, we help clients try to extract that to get over the cliches of being like, we have a better product where it's more quality, it's more innovative, and we're transparent. It's like all these cliches, but as agencies, the trend is that we design and we're better at it.

25:08There's nothing differentiated about that. So it's so ironic. This is the creative sector. Let's see some more weird. Come on. Let's be creative, guys. Come on now. Creative people. It's allowed. The other thing that I was going to point out was that I've worked across different agencies for many years and even run a couple of agencies myself. And one of the things that I always found myself getting into conversations around is the process, right? Like our process is different, right? so what you tend to find is that basically well this is what i found anyway agencies package up their process in a way that they think is unique and they give it a name it could be anything and then maybe there's different levels of processes that they go through so you know you've got bronze silver gold for example and they they call it different things and again like similar to what you were saying emily i think people tend to think the processes is massively unique now there might be the odd you know different thing that one agency might do than another but on the whole i find that the process of design is at least that what the way it's marketed and then usually what happens behind the scenes is pretty similar you know there's an exploration then there's concepts that are put together and a bit of back and forth and then there's the polishing at the end ultimately that's tends to be what tends to happen in in the creative services did you find something similar as well emily on that when you were going through these Was there very sort of similar processes just dressed up in different colors or something or different names?

26:34I think there is a trend for making that very generic process into something that's a bit more of a signature product. There is a greater sense of productization coming in, but this is all very new and creating packages that sort of have almost like programs that you buy into. and it's very sort of standardized. But I think the other way of looking at the product is to look at it, frame it in terms of client problems and scenarios. And Collins in New York, I think have something like 11 different packages on their website, each of which targets a very specific client problem and situation. And for me, that is much more interesting than a menu of services.

27:30It's your kind of worst case scenario, really. That's kind of really starting with the basics. But I think the Collins example is really interesting. I'm going to ask a silly question now, but why is that the worst of all situations, Emily, to see a menu? Because you are expecting your audience to make sense of it, and they're not the experts in these disciplines. What they care about is their business and their current challenge or problem. So we need to work a bit harder to meet them where they are and understand what they need to hear that's relevant for their situation. But also don't forget to be the creative.

28:11I think it might have been John Hegarty also. Somebody had a brilliant story about a new agency, that rocks up to a pitch and they were so nervous about this pitch they're trying to put on their best possible performance so they all wore suits and they show up with this shiny presentation and at the end of the presentation the client says where are the t-shirts I want a creative inspiration and what the agency had done is they're just trying to mirror this corporate environment that they were walking into whereas our superpower as creatives is that we offer something different we offer a skill set that perhaps the client doesn't have in-house and that's that's good that's something to be embraced it's like you were saying earlier like take a perceived weakness or at least a perceived reality that could be by weakness like the agency with a lot of more experienced people and actually make that the strength like make that turn it around and be like yeah that is what we are and that is this is value for for these reasons so I think that's a that's a brilliant that's a brilliant way of thinking I want to shift here because you yourself run your micro agency and you're I know you're a word specialist because I've worked with you before so like how how has that report sort of influenced the way that you think about your agency like have you considered the way you niche are you happy to share anything you know in terms of how that sort of shifted your perspective?

29:35Well, I think I've definitely refined how I present my offer and my proposition. I've been running Be Colourful for 13 years now, so that has been a journey. I have a mantra of my own, which is don't be noisy, be interesting. And that stands for a lot of things. It's about not being dull. It's about showing up as interesting and interesting might mean relevant for clients or different to all of the other candidates. But it's also about not wasting your energy on just spamming your audience, you know, get specific, get focused on the right message. Over the years, you just sort of realise what is working for you and what isn't.

30:28I pretty early on, I decided that I wasn't going to take part in pitches because they were draining my energy. It wasn't something that brought me joy. There are certain non-negotiables and I add to this list of non-negotiables quite frequently, but it gives me some sort of foundational principles for how I run my business. So I don't do any cold outreach at all. I believe in branding, even in B2B, even as an agency. So I try to build my agency as a brand and attract the right audience. Nice. And as a sort of a word specialist, verbal identity, how important is verbal identity in creating distinction and particularly for agencies, you know, going along in the discussion that we've had.