How to make “good” decisions for your brand

Hi all,

Ethan here. We’re back online, somewhat rested, but very much excited for the year ahead. In Dialog news, we’ve hit the ground running, kicking off a couple of new projects to start 2025. We are, however, still taking more bookings so if you have anything on the agenda for late Jan/Feb or just want to chat more about your marketing/brand plan for the year ahead, my phones always on!

As will be the case in all future EDMs, one of the Dialog team will take the opportunity to share a few humble words about something they’ve been thinking about in recent weeks – so, without further ado, here’s what’s been on my mind…

A few thoughts on decision-making

Last year – that long lost 2024 – I sat with clients and asked them to make decisions well over 100 times.

“Do you want this design with a blue background or black?”
“Do you want your logo to have a symbol or just a wordmark?”
“Do you want to go with the brand awareness or conversion campaign?”
“Don’t you think the bright pink and yellow is a bit much?”

I then get to sit and wait for the response. Sometimes, I’m ambivalent: I don’t really mind if the background is blue or black; other times, I’m scared: I certainly do hope they feel the bright pink and yellow is a bit much and are open to another concept.

Regardless, a decision must be made, and often without any clear evidence for which is the better option. Predicting the future is hard. And, as all of us who were in business through Covid and a recession know, even the best-laid, most well-evidenced plans can prove ‘wrong’ after one news report changes everything. Just ask me: I started a shared space business six-ish months before the first lockdown.

So, a question on my mind at the start of this year was, “How can we better help clients make decisions in 2025?” And equally, “How can we better help ourselves to make decisions for our own business in 2025?”

Two quotes immediately came to mind: one from a 19th Century Danish existentialist; the other from a 20th Century Harvard Psychology professor. The former I learnt in my time at university, the latter I heard recently on an Insta reel – so you win some, you lose some.

First, Soren Kierkegaard:
“Do it or don't do it, you will regret both.”

Second, Ellen J. Langer:
“Rather than waste your time trying to make the right decision, you should spend your time making the decision right.”

Essentially, these quotes, though 100-ish years apart, say the same thing (Langer, the Harvard psychologist, just says it in a far more positive way): there is no ‘perfect decision’, just as there is no ‘the one’ when looking for a partner. What both Langer and Kierkegaard are actually repeating themselves (there’s truly nothing new in the world) is the age-old proverb: “no one knows what tomorrow will bring.”

The illusion of control we have over our own lives is just that – an illusion. Even when we reflect a year later if a decision we made was the correct one, it’s still impossible to know the answer.

For example, it’s easy to say, “I’m overwhelmingly happy that I didn’t start that café last year just before the recession hit,” but even now it’s impossible to know the outcome of such a decision. A customer who admired your tenacity could have asked you to join a life-changing business partnership, or perhaps the lessons you learnt during the failed venture may have put in good stead for a future successful one. The world is full of possible futures, and not even the most powerful quantum computer could assess every potential outcome.

The conclusion here is this: instead of spending endless time fretting over every small decision in our lives (or businesses), we should simply make a decision, and then spend our efforts making that decision the right one.

In our world – the world of brand, marketing, and good business – this means once a logo direction has been selected, we give it our absolute all, even if it wasn’t our first choice. This means that after deciding on a design or logo or campaign idea, our clients should throw it out to the world confidently and enthusiastically own every part of it. And this is what we’ve found: once we own our decisions, they do – at least most of the time – become the right ones.

As almost every podcast and book on business I consumed last year last year drummed into me, business is more about execution than good ideas and good decisions. Anyone can make a good decision, but not everyone can take the necessary action to ensure the decision is a good one.

Of course, as some of you will be rightly thinking, there are exceptions. Just ask the person who bets on the wrong team and loses their half their savings – that is indeed a bad decision. What I’m not asking anyone here to do is to stop critical thinking altogether.

What I am asking you to do, or at least asking myself and our team to do, is this: ask the right people for advice and gather all the evidence we can, but when the time comes for the decision to be made, just make it, and then make sure it’s the right one.