Educating Clients on the Creative Process: Two Tips
At Deducers, we tell our students that a crucial part of a producer’s job is to educate clients on the creative process. Often, clients don’t know the studio’s creative workflows, and they don’t understand the time it takes to get a job done or to do it right. At times, it seems like many have beliefs about creative requirements that are very far from the mark. This can be frustrating, and it can lead to diminished morale within the creative team, inefficiencies in the creative process, and lost profits for the studio.
How can we manage their expectations and help them learn?
Let’s look at what the science of learning tells us about how people learn information and make sense of the world around them.
1. People make sense of the world by organizing information into coherent schemas.
Schema theory posits that our brains create mental frameworks, including patterns of thought, i.e., “schemas,” which help us organize and interpret information. Our brains love organization. When new information fits into our existing schemas, it’s easier to understand and remember. For example, if we see a large, furry, black animal with a short tail, running on four legs through the woods, we might think, bear. We assimilate the visual information with our existing knowledge of bears as being a certain shape, size and color as well as living in certain habitats and walking on all fours. It makes sense.
Over our lives, we develop many schemas. Some are informed by formal education, and many are informed by our experiences. By the time we are adults, we have lots of schemas, and for better or worse they are how we all make sense of the world around us. Our clients come to us with many of these frameworks for making sense of the creative world already built, which is why their requests might seem sensible to them, but nonsensical to us.
Let’s imagine a client who wants to change the font in a two-minute brand anthem piece at the last minute. They want to make the font more condensed, which will not only change the composition of the elements on the screen but also alter the overall look and feel of the brand. Unfortunately, the design has been approved and the spot has already been rendered. The client seems to think it will be a super simple fix and is a bit shocked at the request for an overage. Why are their beliefs so far from where they need to be? If you’re a seasoned producer, you might be thinking, the producer on the job hasn’t managed the client appropriately. Or, you might be thinking, the client is too demanding. You might be right on both counts, but before we jump to conclusions, let’s think about what schema theory tells us regarding our client. The question we need to ask here is, why does the client think that this will be easy, i.e., what schemas are the client relying on to make sense of their own request? If we can see the issue from the client’s perspective, we can address and correct their misconceptions.
The most intuitive judgment to the client might well be that the request is minor. Imagine that they’ve changed the font many times on their print ads using simple editing tools, e.g., in Canva, with just a few clicks. Given this, their expectation about what it will take for the creative team to make these fixes fits well with what they already know—the changes I made were simple, and this team is way better than me, so it should be easy for them to do.
Of course, as producers well know, the client’s request is not as trivial as it seems. Changing the font at this point requires going back into the design and layout phase, rethinking it, adjusting everything, and then re-rendering the spot. This process could involve multiple team members and a serious chunk of time to rework the spot, test the changes, and ensure everything looks seamless. Clearly, if the client’s existing schema doesn’t account for these professional requirements, there will be a significant gap in their understanding.
The upshot: Careful consideration of where the client is coming from (i.e., how they make sense of the world) enables us to pinpoint the issue more easily and, in this case, address it more empathetically. This can build trust and strengthen the relationship. If we understand where this client is coming from, we can see that, instead of just leveraging the scope proposal, what we need to do, in addition, is provide the client with a different framework for interpreting their request. We need to teach them the creative process so that they have a more realistic reference point. Ideally, these conversations happen up front. Even so, it’s easy for everyone to slip into old patterns of thought, and, in turn, it’s unsurprising that more than one conversation might be necessary to shift the client’s frame of reference.
2. People remember things better when information is presented verbally and visually (using words and pictures).
Clearly, if you’re faced with a client like the one we’ve been discussing, you’re going to need to have a conversation. However, just having a conversation isn’t always the best way to tackle the issue.
Science tells us that people process verbal and visual information differently. This is called the dual coding theory, which was introduced by Allan Paivio in the late 1960’s early 1970’s and has been influential in education and cognitive psychology ever since. The dual coding theory has been thoroughly vetted by research, and the evidence suggests that information can be more effectively remembered and retrieved when it is encoded using both verbal and non-verbal methods. When information is encoded in these ways, people have more points to access the information they need. If they recall the verbal information, this can cue the visual information. If they recall the visual information, this can cue the verbal information. In turn, recall is not only more likely because of the multiple access points, but more information is likely to be recalled, by association. The pieces fit together, and so they are easily recalled in tandem just like when someone says “bath” you probably think “water,” and also picture a bathtub . . . and perhaps soap, or shampoo all the while pondering how “warm” and “relaxing” it will be . . . which naturally triggers the thought, “that’s a great idea, I need a relaxing bath.”
Given this, teachers are taught to make use of verbal and visual elements in their lessons whenever they can. Producers, though they don’t run classrooms, are teachers too. When educating their clients they should also be mindful of how people process information (visually and verbally). No matter what, they shouldn’t leave the client to interpret requests according to the client’s most intuitive way of framing the request because these are, as we’ve discussed, replete with knowledge gaps. Doing so will only bode poorly for the project and the relationship.
The upshot: To make the most of your conversations with clients, back them up with some visuals where you can. For example, use a graphic representation of workflows to help show the client the stage and demonstrate why changing the font after a certain point is not a simple fix. This way, they can visually identify the number of phases that would need to be repeated with approval to get back to where the project is currently at.
The studio might also create a video or a deck that contains graphic images and explains the creative process, and give this to the client at the outset. (Shout out to Ali Ferrari who mentioned doing this on a recent Monday Meeting podcast!)
