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How to extend your brand and not overshadow your clients

That’s a question, isn’t it? How do I get what I want or need without alienating the people who send me money?

It comes down to a critical point I make to all of our clients, and it really doesn’t matter what their business is. It’s never about you. It’s about your customer, even when it’s about you.

I have a client, a not-to-be named one in this particular instance because this story isn’t about her, who wanted to know why she was getting no traffic and no response to a project she’d worked hard on and sent out into her social media world. So I went and took a look.

What she’d done was pretty straightforward. Her title was a question. The content was a link to her project. Simple enough, right? Ask a question. Wait for replies. What she had not done was pretty clear to me too, even if it was hard for her to see because she was so deep into the project.

She didn’t give anyone anything. And by that, I don’t mean that she didn’t give them something material. She didn’t give them something to engage them. She didn’t reveal what she was thinking; she didn’t start a discussion she was asking them to continue or to refute; she didn’t share her work by making them a part of it. She only asked something from them.

It’s never about you, it’s always about your customer, even when it’s about you – especially when it’s about you.

People can tell when you’re self serving. Then you lose your authenticity and you stink like a wet dog*. So you make it about them.

We had a challenge along these lines with a Dutchess County non-profit called Families First New York. Their role is to help non-profits by consolidating their back offices, providing administrative services, finance and accounting, human resouces, IT, and marketing and communications. Their job is to be the invisible back end so that their clients can focus on their core missions.

So the question becomes: How do I get my business out front when my business is to stand behind people? And keep in mind, this is the non-profit world. Being invisible is no way to raise money. Being a threat to cannibalize the funding resources of your affiliates is no way to keep your affiliates.

In creating an identity for Families First, we knew from the outset we had to make it about their affiliates’ identities. They had to have a presence, but it had to be in support; as a footnote, if you will.

So we made the entire project about their affiliates, designing new identity systems for all of them as part of a broader Families First marketing effort. We designed the Families First mark to work as an asterisk, in different color palettes as needed. It’s about the client, even when it’s about you.

The interesting result we didn’t entirely anticipate was what that Families First footnote at the bottom of the page did. It made the primary organization, the client, look even stronger because they had someone standing behind them.






* A wet dog: A term Alex is fond of using to describe something that stinks for less than savory reasons, with the implication of manipulation or the selling of snake oil.