The best brands sing. You know what I mean. When all the brand elements work together they can really create something special. The world’s most distinctive brands are harmonious—one with their audience, their market, and their employees.
The process to get there? Well, that’s a different story.
When we started Matchstic, we came up with three core values to guide us. Harmony was our secret ingredient for working together. From the moment we started, we knew we wanted people to like working at Matchstic. But after twenty years, harmony has become a lot more than that.
When we found harmony internally, we found out how to create harmony in the brands we help create.
Honor and Respect Everyone
We like to think we’re experts in branding, but it’s important to remember that our clients are experts in their business. So, we have to trust each other.
At first, harmony at Matchstic was mostly about showing respect for each other. As the years have gone on, though, we’ve noticed how important it is to share that same respect with our clients. After all, it’s important to remember that they’re the ones in a difficult situation. Their business is in our hands. If the project goes well, it’s good for their career. If the project goes poorly—well—let’s not think about that.
Show up, be open-minded, and have some empathy. That’s the name of the game. I like to remind everyone that at the end of the day, this is their flag that they get to fly. No matter how passionate we are about a certain symbol or tagline—the work is the relationship. Not just the product.
We are working with each other and for each other. If we want to respect each other and our contributions, we have to start by honoring and respecting the people trusting us with their business.
Assume the Best
There can often be a posture of distrust in agency-client relationships. In our experience, that distrust is where the problems start. Instead, we like to assume the best. Internally and out.
We hire experts and like to treat them like experts. When we work with clients, we focus on being transparent. The universal truth of branding is that every working relationship has challenges. We don’t ignore those challenges, but encourage everyone to go at them directly under the assumption that it will all work out.
When we assume quality work, honest intentions, and great results, we stay focused on solutions from the get-go. Conversations stay open, morale stays high, and we’re armed to navigate conflict.
The trick to harmony is that it's easier to maintain than it is to get back. That’s why we start by assuming the best. Starting from a foundation of trust leads to stronger work.
Strike a Balance
Courage and care. When we find both, we’re in our sweet spot. We have to respect everyone’s needs, limitations, and expectations—that’s care. But we also can’t just give them what they want without thinking about the problem they hired us to solve. We have to give them what they need—that’s courage.
Building brands requires constantly working with nuances. The answer is rarely yes or no. It’s almost always in-between. The right answer requires exploration—working with the unknowns. That means diving deeper, exploring further, and challenging the client’s expectations.
Striking a balance means fighting for what we believe, but also letting the client fight back, because they see things we don’t see, and we need to be all-in together.
Harmony leads to harmonious brands
When everyone feels aligned and is working towards the same goal—that’s when you get a great result. For us, that means honoring and respecting everyone, assuming the best, and striking a balance between courage and care.
When we first started thinking about values, harmony was our ringer. We thought it would make Matchstic a place where people wanted to work. Turns out, harmony is a big part of how we work, too.
The only way to build harmonious brands is to start with harmonious teams.
