The Start of “The Process”
I’ve been managing global brand accounts for 15 years and I still think the most underrated part of this job is the first conversation. Not the proposal, not the presentation, not the creative review. That first call where you actually figure out what someone is trying to do.
I got into this field because I find brand problems genuinely interesting. Not in a theoretical way, in a very practical, why-does-this-keep-going-wrong way. And after a decade and a half of working with clients ranging from small local businesses to international pharmaceutical companies, I can tell you that the ones who struggle most are almost never struggling because of bad design or bad production. They’re struggling because somewhere early on, nobody slowed down enough to ask the right questions.
At Superior, we built the answer to that into our process. We call the first step Gather. Here’s what it actually means and why I think it matters more than almost anything else we do.
The clients who struggle most are rarely struggling because of bad design. They’re struggling because nobody slowed down to ask the right questions early on.
What I Mean When I Say “Gather”
Before we touch a file or place an order, we have a real conversation with you. Not a check-the-box intake call. A conversation where I’m actually trying to understand your business, your history, your goals, and the specific thing you’re trying to solve right now.
I want to know what your brand has looked like up until this point, what you feel good about and what you don’t, who your customers are and what you need them to think when they see your name. I want to know what’s coming up, whether that’s a trade show or a product launch or a rebrand you’ve been putting off for two years because it feels overwhelming. And I want to know what’s gone wrong so we can mitigate that moving forward.
Most clients come in thinking this will feel like a sales call. It doesn’t. By the end of it, I usually know enough about the business to start making real recommendations, not just quote a catalog item.
The Things That Come Up That Clients Didn’t Know They’d Say
One of my favorite parts of these conversations is when someone says something they didn’t plan to say. It happens more than you’d think.
A client will come in asking for new apparel for an upcoming event and by the end of the call we’re talking about the fact that their logo has four different versions floating around the company and nobody knows which one is current. Or someone will mention offhand that they’ve been with three different vendors in two years and they’re exhausted from re-explaining their brand standards every time. Or they’ll say their materials look fine but they never feel excited to hand them out. My job is to know your brand inside and out so I can take that off your plate.
None of that comes out if you’re just processing an order. It comes out when you’re actually listening. And every single one of those things changes how I think about the project and what I’d recommend. Communication is the key to a successful partnership.
I’ve had clients come in asking for new shirts and leave with a plan to fix something they’d been living with for years. That only happens because someone asked.
Why This Doesn’t Happen Everywhere
To play devils advocate, a lot of vendors are operating under real constraints. High volume, tight margins, fast turnaround. In that model, spending 30 minutes on a discovery call for every order doesn’t make financial sense. You take the file, you run the job, you move on.
I understand that model. I’ve watched it create messes for clients who then came to us to sort things out. The colors drifted across vendors because nobody standardized them. The logo got stretched or recolored by someone who was working from a low-res file someone emailed in 2019. The materials look like they came from three different companies because technically they did. None of it was malicious. It was just what happens when speed is the priority and context gets lost.
The Gather step is our way of making sure context doesn’t get lost. It adds time upfront, yes. But it consistently produces better outcomes, fewer reprints, fewer surprises, and clients who actually feel like someone understood what they were trying to do.
It’s the Same Conversation No Matter Who You Are
I work on global accounts. I’ve managed branded programs for large healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, and national retailers. I’ve also helped small businesses in the Boston area put together their first professional brand package. The first conversation I have is the same.
Some people expect that a smaller account means a more abbreviated process. It doesn’t. The questions I need to answer to do my job well are the same whether someone is spending five hundred dollars or five hundred thousand. What is this brand trying to say? Who needs to receive these materials and when? What does success look like? What do we need to avoid?
In 15 years I’ve found that the projects that go sideways are almost always the ones where someone skipped that part. And the ones that go well, where the client is genuinely proud of what they got, almost always started with a good conversation.
If You’re Reading This, Let’s TalkChances are you have something you’re working on or something you’ve been meaning to address. A brand refresh, a new campaign, materials that need updating, a logistics situation that’s gotten complicated. Whatever it is, the first step is the same. Just remember, anything you can put your logo on, is something Superior can help you with.
Tell us about it. I promise it’s a better use of 30 minutes than uploading a file and hoping the result looks right.
Reach out at superiorbrandsolutions.com. I’d love to hear what you’re working on.
Allison Collins is the Director of Global Accounts at Superior Brand Solutions, where she has spent 15 years helping businesses of all sizes build brand programs that actually hold up in the real world. She specializes in working with large, complex organizations that need their brand to show up consistently across many locations, teams, and touchpoints. My favorite part of the job is being a small part of everyone’s business.
