The approach to collaborating with one of the biggest brands in the world by Ben Langsfeld, Executive Creative Director at BUCK.
Not long ago, we were making a homemade sock puppet music video for asthma awareness. Fast forward 10 years, and we’re designing global campaigns for the most used operating system on the planet, reaching billions of eyeballs every single day.
How, exactly, did we get here?
The journey from sock puppet to the tippity-top of the Fortune 500 has taught us much about what works (and what doesn’t) when collaborating with the biggest brands on the planet.
What follows isn’t a case study about our marketing work on Windows 11.
This is a case study in collaboration.
DEEP UNDERSTANDING
The foundation upon which all of our work is built is a deep, immersive, and sustained understanding of who the client is, where they’re coming from, and where they’re going. And that doesn’t happen overnight.
For Microsoft and BUCK, that understanding developed over nearly a decade on almost a dozen briefs. From the beginning of this relationship, our signature approach resonated with Microsoft, who recognized the potential to push their brand in new and exciting ways. They loved that we were able to bring an elevated sense of humanity and joy to the brand.
And so one project led into another. And then another one after that. Our relationship grew with each campaign as we forged an ever deeper understanding with each project.
There is no shortcut to fostering this kind of relationship. You have to put in the time and the work, and you have to develop that history.
FLEXIBILITY & CONSISTENCY
When you are making work for a large, global brand there are so many surfaces and markets moving parts to consider, so many different surfaces where that work will be applied that it becomes nearly impossible to control how that work will be rolled out or how it will be showcased.
You don’t want the work to feel repetitive and you don’t want to give the audience permission to swipe (figuratively or literally). So instead of obsessing on a single campaign or an individual film, we approach the work as a design system and focus our thinking on scale and flexibility.
This means seeing the multitude of applications and surfaces as an opportunity. How can we continually make the work feel fresh and new but also part of a whole?
Practically speaking, we do this by crafting a scalable design system that comes with a large library of assets and a road map for how it can be used to generate infinite iterations. This involves not just design and animation but consistent involvement from our brand strategy team and Herculean support from producers.
TRUST FIRST, BRIEF SECOND
When you’re building a deep understanding of a brand over time, you begin to reap the benefits of a sustained collaboration. One way that manifests itself is through trust.
We usually begin with a conversation and guiding questions:
- What’s the problem?
- What’s the product that’s launching?
- Who is the audience?
Through dialogue, we discover the brief together. What we come up with is often different than our initial assumptions.
The trust that we extend to each other acts as a divining rod to get at the heart of the matter. Over time, a truth emerges that becomes our mantra: We aren’t designing for Microsoft; we’re designing with them.
EMBRACE THEIR PHILOSOPHY
The Microsoft brand has a global audience with 1.4 billion monthly active devices running Windows 10 or 11 (Microsoft 2022 Annual Report). That wasn’t by accident, it’s core to their mission of empowering people and organizations to achieve more.
Because of this philosophy, their user feedback loop is seriously impressive. Accessibility and functionality is everything to them. And so accessibility and functionality became our internal litmus test for everything we did. It’s not enough to make killer designs. It has to work for everyone from Toledo to Thailand.
Microsoft has a product-forward approach that goes beyond selling a lifestyle or a vibe. Real products for real people. And every story they tell is ultimately in service of a product.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
We’re not under the misconception that anything we’re sharing here is some revolutionary new idea. It’s really about putting all these ideas together into a single package and practice.
Some of these ideas, like deep understanding or trust, develop and strengthen over time. They are really an argument for building genuinely collaborative relationships as a means to producing great work.
Embracing the client’s philosophy and flexibility and consistency comes with scalable design systems.
With that in mind, we want to leave you with this reflection from Samuel Clarke, the Creative Studio Director at Microsoft:
“It’s been incredible to watch our collaboration grow out of early conversations between BUCK and Microsoft into this new, organic design system that has come to define the global brand of Windows 11.
Like a jazz ensemble, we needed to form a chord chart to follow, but we have always allowed ourselves the space to explore and push the boundaries of what we could create, even from the very start.
Brands are living things. At some point, the best brands begin to grow on their own, along with the people who love them.”
We’re not finished. If, some years down the line, you find yourself in Times Square looking up at a Microsoft anthem delivered entirely through the medium of sock puppets, you’ll know who to thank.
