What The Work Taught Me:
Happy Work Spectacular Life
What happens when the people you’re trying to understand are experts at understanding people?
When John Philbin and Jodi Wellman came to BatesMeron with an idea called Happy Work Spectacular Life, they already knew a thing or two about helping people become better at what they do. Actually, a lot more than a thing or two.
John and Jodi had built impressive careers helping professionals and leaders understand what motivates them, what gets in their way and how to get more out of their work and their lives. They’d worked with leaders at some seriously impressive organizations and brought years of expertise in psychology, coaching, leadership and human behavior to the table. No pressure for the people about to ask them a bunch of questions about themselves. (cue: Freddie & David singing ‘Under Pressure’ here)
Now they were building something of their own.
The idea behind Happy Work Spectacular Life was big, smart and wonderfully unconventional. John and Jodi knew what they wanted to put into the world. What they needed was a brand that could capture it.
That’s where we came in.
Every branding project starts with questions.
What do you do? Why does it matter? Who needs it? What makes you different? How should people feel when they encounter you? But this time, we were asking those questions of two people who had built their careers asking excellent questions themselves. And as it turned out, while we were helping John and Jodi find clarity in their new brand, they were teaching us a few things, too.
From fuzzy to focused
John and Jodi weren’t starting from nothing. Quite the opposite.
They had ideas. Lots of them. They had expertise, perspective and a strong sense of the experience they wanted to create. What they didn’t yet have was a brand capable of containing all of it. Time for BatesMeron to do what we do!
We asked questions. We listened. We covered conference room walls with inspiration. We talked about beliefs, audiences, competitors, personality, language and aesthetics. We dug around until the ideas that felt disconnected began revealing the connections between them.
Jodi later described that process beautifully:
“They came in with the discovery session that helped us take the fuzzy lines and sharpen up the edges.”
I’ve always loved that description because it’s remarkably close to what good discovery should do.
A client doesn’t hire a branding agency because they have nothing to say. Usually, they have too much to say. They’ve been living inside the idea. They know its history, its possibilities, its nuances and all the little things that make it special. Our job isn’t to walk into the room and magically know more about their business than they do. It’s to listen closely enough to find the signal inside all that wonderful noise.
Expertise doesn’t eliminate the need for discovery
There’s something else I appreciate about this project even more in hindsight. John and Jodi were experts. These were people who had spent their careers helping accomplished professionals find clarity, identify what mattered and move toward something better. They understood people. They understood work. They understood how deceptively difficult it can be to answer questions that sound simple.
And still, when it came to their own business, an outside perspective helped. There’s a lesson in that I’ve carried with me ever since: being brilliant at what you do doesn’t necessarily make it easier to explain what you do…sometimes it makes it harder.
You know too much. You see every nuance. And everything you want to say may be completely true. But not everything can carry equal weight.
One of the most valuable things a strong agency partner brings is a little emotional distance, backed by a lot of strategic experience. We can listen to everything that’s important about your business, then help determine what will hit hardest, stick longest and matter most to the people you’re trying to reach.
Because the goal isn’t to say everything that’s true about your brand. It’s to find the truths your audience will remember.
Jodi put it this way:
“They are so intuitive and smart that it didn’t take them long to figure out who we are, what we want, and a great way to present our brand.”
I’ll joyfully take that compliment, but I think the real magic was in the exchange. Because while we were learning how John and Jodi thought, they were teaching us, too.
The best discovery goes both ways
One of my favorite things about this business is how many industries I’ve gotten to wander into over the years.
Our clients have taught us about manufacturing, investing, education, insurance, technology and a thousand other things I never expected to know quite so much about.
Happy Work Spectacular Life taught us about people.
That’s something I don’t think we talk about enough when we talk about discovery.
Yes, we’re there to learn about the client so we can do better work. But if we’re genuinely curious, something else happens. We get better, too.
The best client relationships aren’t built around one side possessing all the answers. They’re built when people with different expertise bring what they know to the same table, stay curious and create something neither could have made alone.
Once you know who you are, you can have a lot more fun
All that serious thinking eventually gave us permission to make something decidedly unserious.
Through discovery, we landed on a personality for Happy Work Spectacular Life that was brainy, optimistic and irreverent. It wasn’t corporate self-help. It wasn’t inspirational poster territory. And it definitely wasn’t interested in taking itself too seriously. That clarity opened the creative floodgates.
We created the “Find Yours.” tagline. A visual identity built around a hand-drawn paper airplane. Business cards that let recipients indicate what they might be interested in discussing, including perfectly reasonable professional matters like “Drinks” and “Bacon.” And we were delighted when John and Jodi embraced our letterhead designed to be folded into a paper airplane.
Because obviously we did. The weirdness worked because it wasn’t arbitrary.
Every unexpected detail reinforced the personality we’d uncovered together. The strategy didn’t rein in the creativity. It gave the creativity somewhere to go. That’s a distinction I still believe in deeply. Strategy isn’t the thing that makes creative work safer. It’s the thing that gives you permission to be bolder.
Serious work doesn’t have to feel serious. Seriously.
There’s one more thing Jodi said about the experience that has stuck with me:
“BatesMeron Sweet Design under promised and over delivered, and we had a lot of fun along the way.”
The more experienced (OK…older) I get, the more important that last part feels.
Branding can be vulnerable work. You’re asking people to articulate ambitions they may not have said out loud before. You’re questioning assumptions. You’re asking them to make decisions about something they care deeply about, often while they’re still figuring out exactly what that something is.
That’s serious work. But it certainly doesn’t have to be uncomfortable. In fact, I think people do some of their best thinking when they feel safe enough to experiment, laugh, say the half-formed thing and occasionally suggest something ridiculous just to see where it leads. As the agency, part of our job is to create that safety. Be the first to open up. Be the first to throw out the silly idea. Once everyone realizes there are no stupid answers, the good stuff starts coming out. Sometimes it leads nowhere, sometimes it leads to a magnificent idea and a RELATIONSHIP.
What Happy Work Spectacular Life taught me
Looking back, I’m proud of the brand we created for John and Jodi.
But what I remember just as clearly is the privilege of creating alongside two people who were exceptionally good at their own craft. We were there to understand them. They made us think differently about work, fulfillment and what it means to help people find clarity.
That’s the part of discovery you can’t put neatly into a scope of work.
You enter a room carrying your expertise. Your client enters carrying theirs. And if everyone is curious enough, generous enough and willing to listen, those two things play together and something new emerges: A sharper idea. A better brand. And sometimes, a better way of thinking about your own work.
Nearly a decade later, I think that’s one of the reasons this project still makes me smile.
Well, that and the paper airplanes. (I won’t say which client got the logo tattooed on themselves!)
“Without a shadow of a doubt, we’d recommend BatesMeron Sweet Design.”
We’ll take that, too.
“BatesMeron is so intuitive and smart that it didn’t take them long to figure out who we are, what we want and a great way to present our brand. They make it super easy for the client and take the anxiety out of the overwhelming task of figuring out who you are and how you want to represent yourself.”
Related posts:
The Marks of a Healthy Society
Un-Writing the Woman Script
Your Brand’s Website Has Literally Never Been More Important
Made with ♥ in the 312
