Will the Real Branding Specialist Please Stand Up? To whom should a CEO turn for identity advice and assistance? It is easier than ever to be led astray. “Branding” is arguably this decade's hottest buzzword, and to ride this trend many design firms, consultants, and advertising agencies selling quite different kinds of services have all repositioned themselves as “branding specialists.” For corporate assignments, who is best?

Most corporate identity work today is done by one of three types of firm—graphic design, identity specialist, or advertising/marketing agency. Informed (biased?) by my own experience as an independent identity consultant who teams with graphic-design firms, with 10 years prior experience in identity firms and another decade in advertising agencies, I offer these guidelines. Graphic-design firms can do outstanding identity work, as Franke+Fiorella's 2002 work for Cargill testifies. The late, great Paul Rand, who counseled IBM and Westinghouse, worked alone, preferably one-on-one with a CEO client. Graphic designers are best used when the positioning issues are relatively simple—with no subcorporate branding and association issues, no other constituencies who want to be consulted, and a CEO who is already engaged and brings the designer clear and actionable strategic direction.

At the very least, you can be sure that a well-trained graphic designer understands the directness and simplicity of a functionally effective logo. On more complex assignments, graphic designers are likely to team with a consultant, and to outsource naming. (Rand, incidentally, liked my writing and said we should collaborate; but we had met too late.) Identity specialist firms like Siegelgale, Landor, Addison, FutureBrand, and Interbrand are a good choice when the CEO may not yet be fully engaged, the desired positioning is not yet clear (or clearly supported with a management consensus), and there are complex organizational and relationship issues and subsidiary-brand equities—and as a result, a need for a comprehensive situation analysis, consensus-building, and planning phase.

Advertising agencies can do good branding work—planning, positioning, and promoting category brands, that is—but have rarely done good corporate-identity work and as a rule, in my opinion, should not be expected or asked to do so. My heartfelt analysis: Agencies are about marketing and are totally—indeed, passionately—focused on immediate campaigns. They should be.

But identities are more basic and must outlast campaigns, and are more concerned with leadership issues like destination-setting and employee motivation; today's marketing issues are generally of secondary importance. A good agency, doing its job, will always confuse identity with campaign and, therefore, put corporate marketing ahead of corporate essence.

• Agencies seldom have qualified identity analysts and designers on staff. Even the largest agency can't generate enough corporate-identity programs, from its existing client roster, to support them. And a great agency art director may or may not be a good graphic designer; they are quite different jobs.

• There is a good deal of technical knowledge involved in structuring corporate-brand architecture options, in building visual systems beyond the logo design, and in applying identities in media beyond print and broadcast; agencies must reinvent these wheels and are prone to miss them.

• For agencies, a long-term relationship is the ideal. Design and identity firms, too, appreciate lasting relationships, but identity work, I suggest, is best viewed as episodic, and best done by service firms that consider themselves expendable. To best serve their clients, they must constantly prod, educate, and challenge, at continuing risk to the relationship. For this reason alone, thoughtful ad agencies have not sought to build an internal identity practice. Missing from this list are the management-consulting firms, whom one would normally expect to compete for the corporate-leadership and positioning counsel that identity work requires. It's true that the long-established identity firm Lippincott & Margulies is now a member of Mercer Consulting Group (a Marsh & McLennan company).

L&M has worked hard to cross-pollinate the management-consulting and identity-consulting cultures, even changing its name early in 2003 to Lippincott Mercer. To my regret, other consulting leaders have traditionally treated identity work as somehow beneath them, and there are as yet no signals that firms like McKinsey & Co. are exploring corporate identity practices.