Getting to know your branding clients is absolutely vital to having a good branding experience for both you and them. When someone reaches out to you, you’re not just going to immediately start creating for them. You’d be going in blind and just hoping they end up liking what you’ve spent time designing. That wouldn’t be very logical, or fun for anyone involved. When you’ve just landed a new branding client, it’s almost like getting to know a new friend – you want to learn about what they do for a living, why they started their business, what inspires them, etc. All of these things make them who they are and will help discover their overall style and goals for their new branding.
There aren’t necessarily bad questions when getting to know your branding clients, but there are definitely really good questions to ask. These questions will help open up the door to getting to know them and their needs, it will pave the way to a great branding experience and they will make sure you are both on the same page, and have a clear understanding of their vision. The more questions you ask, the more clear the bigger picture will become.
Here are some questions we ask our branding clients when we kick off a project together:
Describe yourself in few words
What inspired you to get into your profession?
Do you have a mission statement?
What do you want this new branding and website to do for your business?
Describe your ideal clients – who are they?
What are some brands you love, and why?
These are just a few of the questions we ask, and we ask even more when doing a branding deep dive session. Some other things we dive into are providing logo style examples and have them choose which one stands out to them, we give them color direction and allow them to select which tones they prefer, and so much more.
We’ve learned over the years that the more we know as their design team, the better we can create for them.
Our goal with each and every branding client is to provide the absolute best experience from start to finish. We believe that starting off each project is like going on a new adventure, and good questions are the roadmap.