Hexanine:

Clients are often the best sources of information about their own organizations—they know their products, mission, and offerings inside and out. But with that familiarity often comes a kind of tunnel vision that limits their perspective. We try to combine the best of our clients’ expertise with our own fresh, “informed outsider” viewpoints. To help build a foundation for good concepts, we can provide clients with customer profiles and schema, trend forecasts, and basic field observations. These are a far cry from the traditional focus group methods, and aren’t used to support already-existing design directions, but to provide a transparent framework clients can see—why we want to focus their communication in certain areas. Usually the biggest barrier to good basic design research isn’t budgets—many of these methods can be done inexpensively. Short, rigid timelines and a “have it done yesterday” mentality are more likely to keep clients from seeing the value in this sort of analysis.
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Ruth Galloway & Glenn Kiernan:

There is no hard a fast rule to the number of concepts we show to our clients. It varies depending on the type of project. Ideally we aim to show only three solutions.

If we are working with a mature identity or packaging brand these three routes will include an evolution (if the brief requires), a mid point, and a revolution. Sometimes if we are confident enough with the rationale, the consumer insights and we have complete courage in our conviction, those moments when you know you have the winner, we will present just one route. This rarely happens as the process usually takes the client on a journey from their present position to the winning idea. We never just present concepts to ‘fill’ a presentation, each concept presented must fit the brief and be something we would happy to develop and be proud to show if chosen by the client.
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