30 - Ragged Edge: brand is an emotional thing

Speaker A: Strong brands are strong brands. If you can build something that people really love, that people identify with, then I think it's. It's just as powerful now as it always has been.

Speaker B: It's easy to be cynical about branding, and never more so than when you've been working in that space for a long stretch. But when I chatted with Max Ottignon, who's been running branding agency Ragged Edge for coming up on 20 years, there was absolutely no cynicism in sight. Max thoroughly and wholeheartedly believes in what branding can achieve. And if anything, he's more of a believer now than he's ever been.

Speaker C: For this episode of Private Views, we

Speaker B: spoke about some of the hardest questions branding still faces.

Speaker A: Every single measurable of brand is vague and imprecise, and, um, it could be attributed to something else. And so if you're brand new investing in brand, you just have to get comfortable with that stuff. There is a lack of precision. It is hard to measure. It is hard to know what's correct. You are going to have to use your intuition.

Speaker B: And we also chatted about why building brands and working with creative agencies requires a level of gut feeling and intuition that maybe doesn't always get the credit it deserves.

Speaker A: And brand is an emotional thing and you want to work with someone who you feel gets you, and I think that's okay. I think that's a really good way of choosing in.

Speaker C: So, Max, I thought we could chat about, you know, the word branding, it encompasses so much stuff. It's such a nebulous phrase, really. Um, and I think the phrase a branding agency also has kind of gone the same way. Um, you guys have been in this business for a while. You've seen a lot of that change. And I wondered if you had thoughts on what it actually means now to be a branding agency. What does that really involve in 2026 and beyond?

Speaker A: Branding's, like, one of the most confused words, um, in existence, isn't it? Because so many people use it to mean so many different things. And so branding agencies are, uh, lots of different things, I think. And, um, you know, everything from, like, brand strategy agencies to purely, like, visual identity and like, just pure design. Um, you have agencies that do a real breadth of, like, not just the brand design, but the content and the comms as well. And so I don't think there is any one definition which is part of the challenge for our industry.

Speaker C: Is it also part of the opportunity? Can we say that optimistically? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: It's first of all to decide. Yeah. And I Think what's really cool is um, we, what I, what I am seeing and what I have seen is that agencies don't feel constrained by the terminology, by what they're supposed to be doing, what people understand a branding agency to be or any other kind of agency. And you're just starting to see, aren't uh, you just like people test the edges and where their work can take them and I think that's really cool and it just really helps people offer a unique service and a unique proposition that no one else can do. Uh, enables people to play to their strengths. It's great.

Speaker C: Do you think clients have caught up to the fact that brand agencies can do many, many things? They're skilled people with many disciplines available to them.

Speaker A: I think some have, yeah. We definitely have noticed a real breadth of um, a breadth of different types of inquiry. So people are coming to us for things that um, we wouldn't previously have expected them to come to us for. And um, I don't know if that's just the way we've been communicating or whether it's just clients thinking this type of organization are great at creative ideas, brand led creative ideas. Let's use them for all sorts of things that involve brand led creative ideas.

Speaker C: What would be some good examples of those more unexpected asks, if you're allowed to say without breaking any NDAs.

Speaker A: Um, well an obvious one is comms. Uh, we hear quite a lot about um, ad agencies, uh, drifting into brand, don't we? And design. But I think what maybe people are sleeping on a little bit is the other way around. And we get asked quite a lot about comms campaigns, um, either as an extension of the brand project or as standalone things. And um, um, I think the skill set that Ragged Edge has and other agencies perhaps like us might have this as well is that ability to take a really single minded idea, craft the brand and then be able to communicate that uh, in uh, comms. It feels really sensible to do that and to have one agency thinking about both those things at the same time?

Speaker C: Max, let's look at it through the lens of Ragged Edge. So let's just do a quick recap. Remind me when you guys were founded because you've grown massively. I believe you launched your new website, your own new brand last year. Things have changed for you as well.

Speaker A: They have changed. Yeah. We launched in 2007. So what's that, 18 plus years now? Yeah, it feels a long time. Feels a long time. Yeah. Um, but it's funny, obviously lots of things have changed. Lots of things have changed, but there's also loads of things that haven't changed as much as you would think. Um, and when we were starting out, yeah, all that's going to go, but the things we cared about, the things that mattered, uh, the things we were trying to do were all the same things we're trying to do now. Uh, just maybe a slightly different scale and slightly different collection of people around us. And you just find yourself as an agency being able to do things that you didn't think were possible, um, a week ago, let alone a decade ago. And that's pretty fun.

Speaker C: Obviously there's been lots of good developments for you guys. I wondered if there's kind of any things that have happened that in terms of that relationship between brand and agency and the way that branding has evolved, it's felt more challenging for you to get to grips with or more challenging to navigate.

Speaker A: So there was a real shift, um, I think a few years ago, particularly with digitally LED brands, where as an agency you had to get much, much more familiar with how to create for a digital. And what that meant was not just the discipline of thinking about the, the end user experience, but also the tools that you would use to get there. Uh, and then also certainly what we found is more and more the way brands wanting to work M in a much more collaborative way, like hiring very, very, um, highly skilled designers on their end. And it not being a case of, um, the client briefs the project and the agency does the project. M what's become the way we're working, and I believe the way lots of others are working as well, is it's much, much more collaborative now. And that takes quite a different mindset that we've all had to learn and adapt to. I think the result of it is much, much better work. And I think it means that work doesn't just sit in PDFs or figmas anymore. Um, it ends up getting adopted because you've got the people really buying into it as you create it. But it has been a mindset shift.

Speaker C: Is it used or did it used to be the case that you'd finish your brand, you'd work fairly separately to the client and you'd hand it over, you'd dust your hands off and go on your merry way. And now it sounds like there's a lot more involving the client in the process. It's a lot more iterative. From what I understand. There's a lot more closeness between the two sides.

Speaker A: That is definitely the case. Yes, definitely the case. I mean we would Never want to like wash our hands of it. But sometimes it was, you know, that was the brief was make us a thing, give it to us and we'll go our way and go away and use it. And like, one thing we talk quite a lot about, like the IKEA effect. So this idea that if you make something yourself, you're more likely to love it. Um, and so just the mere act of the client being involved in the making of the system and the making of the assets and the making of the brand means that they're going to be much more attached to it long term because it's something that they've had real agency over. Uh, and so it means that the work ends up much more likely to really live and breathe and be experienced by real people, not just sound service.

Speaker C: I was laughing because I was thinking of all the awful flat pack furniture.

Speaker B: I've said

Speaker A: the IKEA effect not work for you.

Speaker C: I think the principle makes a lot of sense. I'm assuming for designers, for brand people, that feels better for you as well. You really want to be working with a client that's invested. Having that disconnect just feels, feels like it's not a very productive relationship.

Speaker A: Yeah. And um, like our biggest frustration always used to be like, think of any branding agency would have this and you would just experience how much of this are they actually going to use. And you just like never really had any control over it. And that's very different now. And like if you're making stuff that gets signed off and doesn't get used, like something's gone wrong now. Whereas that, uh, maybe didn't used to be the case.

Speaker C: There's lots of tools around now that make things or should make things faster. Uh, but that actually, while we're all pushing for efficiency, branding projects are more complicated, they're longer, there's more people involved. And I think that's quite an interesting paradox. You think it should be faster, so why is it slower? Why is it bigger? Why are there so many more people involved?

Speaker A: Yes, um, I think if you are optimizing a branding project for efficiency, not impact, you're just optimizing for the wrong things. Like it doesn't really, like whether a brand takes a month, two months, six months, 12 months to make is not really going to be defining whether it's successful. Um, because a brand's a long term investment, you want these things to last decades really. Uh, and so saving time is a, if it's at the cost of quality, which generally saving time does tend to compromise on Quality, Um, it seems to be, um, a bit of a false saving really.

Speaker C: Is it possible to be both committed to a great end result and under a lot of time pressure?

Speaker A: You can try. Um, and we have tried. It's almost impossible still to combine a very compressed timeline with the right level of quality. And you always have to compromise somewhere. And it might just be that the clients have to compromise in terms of, you know, number of iterations, time that they, they're allowed to make a decision. So it's not always like our work is not as good, but you are definitely making compromises somewhere. And we, we really try hard not to do it. And I will be honest with clients if we, we did it literally yesterday where we turned down a piece of work we really wanted to do, um, because we, it was just too, the risk was too high of it not not being good enough because they weren't, they weren't able to allocate the right amount of time to it.

Speaker C: Max, at the beginning of our chat, you, you kind of said that lots, lots of things have changed, but I guess the core principles of being a branding agency have stayed the same. Um, do all those same ways of building a brand still work now? Is it all the same principles? How much has it actually evolved from that?

Speaker A: That's a great question. I think people are always, it's more exciting to say that everything's changed. It's more exciting to say like, oh, it's all different today because of, uh, this technology or this technology or this new development or this new platform. That means people are interacting with brands in a different way. And of course at a sort of executional level, at uh, a tactical level, of course there are things that are different. Um, and when a new, you know, your new social media platform comes out, you have to execute for that platform in a different way. When people are starting to interact with brands and products in different ways and you know, AI, like chatbots, different interfaces, all that stuff, of course you're going to have to change that stuff, change the way you execute for that stuff. But the core principles of building a brand of like having a real clarity about what you're trying to do, who you're trying to speak to, how you speak to those people, what the idea is that, uh, helps you communicate that thing, how that thing is expressed, like all that stuff is the same.

Speaker C: I love that. I found it really interesting talking to people that work in that performance marketing world, how you might assume they would say, well, it's all about data, or it's all about this or that, but actually it's about something. Some really simple things. It's about, you know, great design, great storytelling, and a great product. Yeah, it feels almost like you're cheating. That feels, in a way, so simple, but also so complicated to achieve.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, it's really hard to achieve. That's why so many people get it right. But. And it's why people keep changing because, you know, they're. They're always trying to find the. Find the perfect solution, but it's hard.

Speaker C: Even if all the old principles still hold true, do you think it's harder now to build a relationship with people because there's just so many brands? I mean, I don't know if you. If I was going to ask you, Max, what brands are you really loyal to, would you have it? Would you have an answer? Would it be easy to think of one?

Speaker A: Human beings, like, we don't always want choice and we want simplicity and we're inherently lazy. And, um, we don't want to be constantly thinking about what brand of toothpaste or granola or, um, which TV streaming service you're going to use. You don't want to be worrying about that stuff. Um, so I think strong brands are strong brands. Um, if you can build something that people really love, that people identify with, then I think it's just as powerful now as it always has been.

Speaker C: I've seen some interesting thoughts as well about, you know, for a while now, potentially, businesses haven't really taken brands seriously or they haven't invested in it as they could have done or they have done, and that we're now in this sort of cyclical stage where we're coming back around to it and everyone's going, oh, actually it is this huge differentiator. After all, it does make a lot of sense. It's not just, you know, we're not just throwing money into a. Into a. Well, yeah, real thing.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, um, one of the really interesting things that's happened recently is obviously the kind of commoditization of technology. Um, and, you know, all the LLMs and the AI platforms and things like that, like, basically all using the same tech. And what that means is that brand becomes even more important. And you're starting to hear people say that and talking about brand as moat. Again, um, I think related, but having done this a little while now, you sort of start to learn that kind of everything is a bit cyclical.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And, yeah, conversations swing from one end to the other, but they tend to sort of come back to the middle.

Speaker C: Yeah, the middle is there.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: I was thinking as well, part of it is just the advice is kind of boring in a way. I started learning a new instrument last year and it really reminded me that the only way really to get better at anything in life is just to do it over and over and over again. And in a way, branding is the same thing. It's just telling the same story over and over again or variations of, or, you know, using the same world of visuals or inviting people into your brand world. You just have to keep doing it.

Speaker A: Yeah, totally. And I think that's always been the case. I think our, uh, industry obviously attracts creative people. What do creative people like to do? They like to create, they like to make new things. Um, they're not, you know, we aren't people that just want to make a thing and then stick to that thing and keep redoing that thing. We want to, we want new. And, um, so it's really hot. And also agencies, business models depend on that. Ad agencies depend on doing a new campaign every year when really they should probably just run the same campaign over and over again. And so, like genuinely. And so they all. Yeah, it's really, really hard as a brand owner, um, not that I've ever been in this position, but it's really, really hard to have that consistency and have that commitment because everyone will be telling you all the time, we need to do this, we need to change this. And yeah, it, People need people in businesses, people want to see progress and they want to see change. And as you say, sometimes it's just about doing the same thing over again.

Speaker C: Max, how much do you rely on intuition? I mean, that's another eternal debate. You know, how much can you measure something? How much is down to human intuition. Especially as someone, you've been doing this since 2007. So you must know in your bones when something is good and when something isn't working.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you learn this stuff and you learn to see it and you learn to see the signs. Um, I think obviously if you listen to all the data and you do everything that the data tells you to do, you're just going to end up doing the same thing as everybody else because everybody has the same data, everyone's talking to the same people. The audience wants what the audience wants, and so you have to break outside of that. The way brands work is by being different. So they get noticed, so they get remembered, and so eventually they get chosen. And so you have to do things that are, ah, counterintuitive. That are almost illogical, that are irrational. Because otherwise if everything is perfectly rational, you'll end up with something that no one notices and no one cares about. Um, you'll uh, end up with a commodity.

Speaker C: I'm curious how you sell that to clients because that sounds like an absolutely terrifying place for a marketer to be in, you know, your brand agency. Saying we don't have the data to tell you this will be the thing that you need to do, but we just feel do this mad irrational, crazy thing and you're going to really fly.

Speaker A: Well, I think like if you selling brand, that's what you're doing every day because it's. I had a conversation today with um, a client and they were asking like a founder of a very successful business and they were like asking what you know, what is brand? Um, how do we measure it? What's it going to change? What's it going to change now? And every single measurable of brand is vague and imprecise and um, it could be attributed to something else. And so if you're investing in brand, you just have to get comfortable with that stuff. There is a lack of precision. It is hard to measure, it is hard to know what's correct. You are going to have to use your intuition. And so yeah, you just, as an agency you get used to telling that story, um, and helping clients make decisions with imperfect information.

Speaker C: It's very difficult, isn't it? Just kind of building a house on shifting sands, um, on quicksand. It might be okay, but there's no guarantee. Maybe that's what makes it enjoyable and maybe that's where the magic is though.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I think of course there are some sort of high profile failures where the process has gone wrong. Usually at least with the benefit of hindsight you can see, okay, well that was probably not a smart choice to make. Um, and I think most of the projects that we see out in the world, most of the rebrands, most of the brand things are genuinely like, I believe to be relatively effective. They're not breaking businesses. Um, because I think most people make broadly smart decisions. They might not be as distinctive as they possibly could be. They might not be as effective as they possibly could be. But I think the risk is often overstated. Um, and that's like creative bravery if we want to call it that, uh, is less risky than lots of people think.

Speaker C: I guess as well the refrain that clients aren't brave enough, that's always going to be the sort of difficult contract you guys have trying to persuade Clients to be braver. Some will be, some won't be. You know, it's just wherever their appetite is. And you guys have to flex around that.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, like, honestly, I mean, we've built our, uh, proposition around doing bold, distinctive work.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And clients come to us for that. Like, we very rare. We're very rarely pushing clients to be braver.

Speaker C: Sometimes.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And sometimes they're pushing us. Um. Ah, I appreciate there is that conversation in the industry. Um, but I think if you work with the right people, um, you can mitigate that.

Speaker C: We were talking earlier about it's very hard to measure how effective some pieces of creative work has been. How does Ragged Edge look at its branding projects and work out? Maybe with the client. Yes, this was good. No, maybe some things need to be tweaked. Yeah.

Speaker A: I think with any. When you're sort of embarking on any project like this, um, at this sort of scale, you need to be clear on what the goal is and what success looks like and how will you know if it's been successful. If you're clear about that, um, at the end of the project, you can hold whatever you've done up against those goals and those ambitions, and you can broadly have a pretty good idea if what you've done has been successful in the way that you've set out to be.

Speaker C: If we were to transplant ourselves into the shoes of a marketer looking for an agency, what are your thoughts to them on how to do a better job? There's a lot of branding agencies that may outwardly seem very similar. What are the things that a client really needs to do when they're meeting an agency to understand that it's a good fit? Is it about kind, um, of working culture? Is it about, you know, the people that you'll be working directly with? Is it about previous projects? Is all of those things none of them?

Speaker A: M. It's definitely a bit of all of those things, isn't it? All of that stuff matters. Um, I think for us, like, the thing that wins us projects and the thing that is our point of view, how we think about the world, what we think a brand and their brand should do and how we want to go about doing that and having. So this isn't quite the answer. This isn't quite answering your question, I don't think. But as agencies, you have a responsibility to have a point of view. And I think as a client, you want to really. The potential client, you want to really listen to that. Do I really buy this? Like, can I really commit to this. Um, I think what we have learned to do and have not always in the past been great at is we've been. We've learned at times we would be a bit of a chameleon, and we would meet a client and try and behave like we thought that client would want us to be. And I think that's really not helpful for the client. Um, and I think what the client needs to know is, like, how that agency thinks, how is that agency different? What is their mindset? How are they going to approach this project? And they need clarity over that.

Speaker C: There's obviously a level of gut feeling as well. I would think from both. From both sides that you feel that this is a client that you would go on well with, and the client feels that. And it's very hard to pin that down. You know, we meets clients and they, you know, they might have already met or looked at a huge number of agencies, and none of them feel right. I think it's very hard to distinguish just on a surface level who's going to be a good fit. It really comes down to something much deeper and much more internal.

Speaker A: I think that's true. And, um. It's an emotional decision.

Speaker C: Yeah, it is.

Speaker A: M and brand is an emotional thing. And you want to work with someone who you feel gets you, and I think that's okay. I think that's a really good way of choosing. It's like, which people do you feel like you connect with? Which people's vision do you feel like you connect with? I think that's good.

Speaker C: Sometimes people feel quite separated from their gut feeling or that it's not okay to trust that because you can't quantify, uh, it. You can't really say that you have a reason for feeling that way. It's just a way that you feel. I wonder if, you know, in the time of all these AI tools where you can kind of use them to validate decisions or, you know, get an opinion from them. If people will maybe rediscover this trust in their own gut feelings or trust in some kind of thought or feeling at the back of your mind that's telling you something.

Speaker A: Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, I think we. Yeah, I mean, there's. There's lots of science behind, isn't there, about, like, why we should often m. Like trust our guts more? Because our guts are basically based on lots of subconscious stuff that we've kind of calculated in the background that we don't even know we've calculated. So, yeah, I'm all for it.

Speaker C: Sometimes Max I've spoken to people working in brand who've become quite cynical about brand, which must be easy when you've been doing it for a long time. The cynical feelings sometimes come, um, that you're wonderfully uncynical. You said there that, you know, brand is, is emotional and it does, you know, when it's right, it can feel quite magical. The connection can feel magical. How have you maintained that through the many, many ups and downs and client projects? How have you kept on believing in that?

Speaker A: I've seen it work and I've seen the power of great brands and great branding, not just in the work we've done, but in the work our industry has done. And I see the value every day. And I feel like part of my purpose of my career and the mission that I've been on is to just try and help people understand that and see what I've seen and see that power and see the impact that it can have. And I feel just as strong. In fact, I feel much more strongly about that now. Thank you. Um, than I did at the beginning of my career just because I've had more exposure to it and more exposure to the, to the, to the power of it.

Speaker C: It's very hard to, it's very hard to be distinctive and singular now. Everything kind of looks the same in a lot of ways. And the magic is when a brand can do something that's completely different or find an agency to help them do something that's really pointed.

Speaker A: Yes, that is the magic. It's really hard. It's really, really hard. And you need a great client team, you need incredibly talented people, you need a rock solid process, you need conviction all the way through. Um, it's hard, um, but I think when you get it right, it is undeniable. The power of it is undeniable. When I got into this industry and when I got excited about this industry, there was a huge amount of optimism in the air. And particularly we do a lot of work in tech and it became a bit of a cliche in that TV show Silicon Valley about every startup had, uh, to sort of frame their offer by we are Making the World a Better Place by xxxxx. And I really love that optimism that excites me. And of course it's naive at times and forced and became subject of satire. But, uh, that really excited me and I think what I've seen over the past decade is a alarming rise in cynicism and I think that the industry now, the tech, um, design brand, has become increasingly cynical. It's become increasingly individualistic. It's become increasingly about like, how can I make more money? And I think that's part of why everyone's finding it harder and harder and harder to enjoy. There's lots of other reasons too, but I think that cynicism is tough. But I also think we talked about it earlier that these things are a pendulum, they're cycles. And I think right now there's a real opportunity and a space for positivity and optimism. And I think that there's an opportunity for brands to cut through by being almost like naive optimism that someone, uh, like innocent or something pioneered all those years ago. Um, or there's a space for people to cut through by being optimistic and positive. In a social media landscape where everyone's snarky and sarcastic and cynical, um, there's a space for agencies to be optimistic, um, and a real demand for agencies, I think, to be optimistic. And so I think that just like brands have to defy convention right now. The convention is cynicism, self interest, um, and like a sort of slight shrugging of the shoulders. What can we do? I think there's a real opportunity for people in the creative world now to, like, stand up and be positive, be, be optimistic and create work that is unashamedly optimistic and be really proud of that. Um, and, yeah, I think that's really exciting.

Speaker C: And when I think about brands that I like and the reasons that I like them, you know, it's because they're generous or they're unusual. You know, they're making films or they're doing this or they're doing that. They're giving things to people, they're setting up events, they're making interesting products. You know, they're embracing really great design. I guess that, uh, is also. They're all forms of optimism. Right. And hope. Yeah. That you're going to connect with someone who will love that stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah. Positivity, like, it's, it's so powerful, but. And it's so much more powerful right now because it's in such short supply.

Speaker C: Dwindling supply.

Speaker A: Yeah. I made a rule for myself, um, where I'd never post anything negative on the Internet. And I pretty much stuck to that. My career, like, I've never. I have, you know, every now and then I get it wrong, but I pretty much stuck to that because it's. It's really tempting to be cynical. It's just like the path of least resistance. And it's much harder to find the positive, to be optimistic, um, to ask, like, why rather than just slate something. We're so lucky. And the careers that we get to have, the people that we get to work with, the, um, briefs that we get, the brands and the products that we all get to work with, it's such an amazing thing to get to do. And I think the cynicism comes from fear of people taking that away. And there is constantly people telling us, making it hard for us. And so, you know, you can see why people find it hard to be positive, um, and particularly at the moment. But there is, you know, as a profession, we are very, very lucky to have this. And if, you know, anybody getting paid to be creative every day is, you know, that is an amazing opportunity that we should all cherish.

Speaker B: That was Ragged Edge founder Max Ottenon talking to me. Ask Us for Ideas Head Coach Content Emma Tucker, thanks for tuning in to another episode. If you'd like to know more about how Ask Us for Ideas introduces brands to agencies, you can find us at, um, aufi.com and if you'd like more insight into the brand marketing and digital world, we're also on substack@askusforideas.substack.com until next time,