Some of the largest IP owners in the world have extraordinarily talented creative teams. They know their brands intimately, understand their audiences and have access to creative resources that smaller organizations could only imagine. And yet, many of them still choose to outsource licensing design.
I’ve always found that interesting because the decision is rarely as simple as needing more design help. In my experience, the real value comes from bringing a different kind of expertise into the process.
Designing for licensing presents a very particular challenge. You’re taking an established brand and creating a visual system that other companies will use to develop products across categories you may not design for every day. The work has to protect what’s equitable about the brand while giving licensees enough creative freedom to do something interesting with it.
That requires a different perspective.
Licensing design is its own discipline
An internal creative team may spend its time developing content, marketing campaigns, digital experiences, advertising, promotions and other expressions of the brand. Their job is to know the brand exceptionally well.
Agencies who specialize in brand licensing design need to look at that same brand through a slightly different lens.
They have to consider how the brand’s visual DNA might translate to toys, apparel, stationery, home goods, collectibles and countless other consumer product categories. They have to anticipate which assets licensees will need, how those assets might be combined and where additional creative direction could inspire better product development.
The challenge isn’t simply understanding the brand. It’s understanding what happens when you hand that brand to someone else and ask them to design with it.
That distinction is one of the primary reasons specialized licensing design expertise can be valuable even when a company has a very capable internal creative organization.
An outside perspective can reveal what’s already there
There’s another advantage to stepping outside the organization.
When you work with a brand every day, certain things naturally become familiar. You know why particular decisions were made. You know which assets have always been important. You know the history behind the visual identity.
An outside creative partner doesn’t have those same assumptions. And, that can be useful.
One of the first things we do when developing a licensing program is immerse ourselves in the brand and look for the visual cues that are truly ownable. Sometimes they’re obvious. Other times, something that may have been treated as a relatively minor part of the brand can become the basis for a much broader design language.
The objective isn’t to reinterpret the brand for the sake of doing something different. It’s to see what might be possible when its existing equity is viewed specifically through the lens of consumer products.
Experience across categories changes the conversation
Licensing programs don’t live within one product category. That’s an important difference.
A design solution that works beautifully on apparel may have little relevance to a toy package. A graphic element that works on a notebook may need to behave very differently on housewares. Something that looks great on a screen may not translate particularly well to a three-dimensional product.
A licensing-focused design consultancy spends its time thinking across those boundaries. That experience can influence decisions early in the creative process. Instead of developing assets for one anticipated application, the goal is to create a visual toolkit with enough range to work across many of them.
It also encourages a different kind of questioning. How will this scale? Can a licensee manipulate it easily? Does it work vertically and horizontally? Can it accommodate different price points? Will it still feel like the same brand when it’s interpreted by companies with very different design capabilities? These are practical licensing questions as much as they are design questions.
The deliverable has to work for people who didn’t create it
This may be one of the biggest distinctions between traditional brand design and licensing design. The people developing the system usually aren’t the people who will ultimately use it.
A licensing program style guide may be distributed to dozens of licensees and their respective design teams. Those designers weren’t in the meetings. They didn’t hear the creative rationale. They weren’t part of the development process. The guide has to do that work for them.
That means the design system needs to be intuitive enough to provide direction without constant explanation and flexible enough to encourage creativity without allowing the brand to drift.
The same principle applies to licensed product packaging. A standardized packaging program has to accommodate different products, structures and manufacturers while still creating a recognizable brand presence at retail.
Developing systems for other designers to use is a specialized skill in itself.
Outsourcing doesn’t mean handing over the brand
I think this is an important point because “outsourcing” can suggest that responsibility for the work is simply being transferred somewhere else. That’s not how the strongest engagements work.
The internal team brings the deep institutional knowledge of the brand. They understand its history, business objectives, audience and long-term direction. The outside licensing design partner brings category experience, an external perspective and an understanding of how to translate that brand into a system that licensees can use. These two perspectives should complement one another.
The goal isn’t for an outside design consultancy to tell a brand owner what its brand should be. It’s to help determine how that brand can work harder within the licensing marketplace.
Specialized expertise can be a strategic choice
This is ultimately why I don’t view outsourcing licensing design as a question of internal capability. For sophisticated IP owners, it can be exactly the opposite.
Knowing when to bring specialized expertise into a project is part of managing a brand well. Licensing creates design challenges that extend beyond any one product, package or campaign. The creative decisions made at the beginning can eventually influence hundreds of products developed by many different companies and presented together at retail. That’s a significant responsibility.
And sometimes the smartest use of an internal creative team’s expertise is to pair it with people who spend their time solving that particular problem.
If you’re considering how your brand should translate into a broader consumer products program, we’d welcome the opportunity to discuss how our approach to style guide design can complement your internal creative resources and give licensees a stronger foundation to build from.
