Every brand project starts with a decision that has nothing to do with design: who’s in the room, and who gets the final say. Dialing in the decision making process is essential.
creating the team
The instinct is to include everyone, because nobody wants to be the person who left someone out. But a group of twelve doesn’t make decisions — it makes compromises, and brand work built out of compromises tends to look like it. You end up with something nobody objects to, and nobody remembers.
For creative work, small, stable teams perform best. A small number of people close to a challenge, understand they are responsible to address it through collaboration perform best. Research into high performing creative teams bear this out.
What works is small and representative. Three to five people, with different vantage points — someone who talks to clients, someone who has to produce materials, someone with actual authority to approve. Different points of view make the project better — especially differences in age, gender, history, and role — and that diversity of perspective is one of the strongest predictors of a brand that actually holds up once it leaves the room. Keep the same people from start to finish. Swapping members mid-project means re-litigating settled decisions — that’s how a six-week project turns into a four-month one.
dynamic teams
Deciding if, when, and how new people are added the group as the project progresses is important. New additions can introduce instability and erode the sense of continuity that good design collaboration depends. At the same time, a fresh perspective at the right moment can surface assumptions the core group stopped questioning weeks ago. Getting this balance right matters. Be deliberate about when — and whether — to open the circle.
From a creator’s point of view, surprise decision makers are unsettling because they can tip a managed process into an unmanaged one. In our experience, stable small teams are optimal.
Two questions worth answering out loud before the first meeting: who has final say, and whose approval is required versus whose input is welcome. Those are different roles, and conflating them is the most common reason a brand project stalls. Someone who thought they had a vote and discovers they had a comment is going to be a problem later.
where brand team decision making shows up later
Who’s on the team isn’t only a kickoff-meeting question. The same people — or their successors — end up owning the brand after delivery: deciding who can approve an exception, and keeping the standards from drifting once the project wraps. That side of it is covered in our brand process page, under “decide who enforces the standards.”
When you’re ready to talk about assembling your team and the work itself, our branding services page explains how we run these projects — and you can always drop us a line with a question at any time.
