“Have you done work in our industry before?”
The wrong question for a branding agency (but the right one for marketing)
When we sit down with a potential clients to discuss branding, a question that almost always comes up is: “Have you done work in our industry before?”
Sometimes the answer is yes. This lands well. The client relaxes. Sometimes the answer is no. A small tension enters the room: a quiet worry that we won’t understand their world.
It’s natural to want a partner who understands your world. But the real question isn’t whether they understand it. It’s whether they can help you change it. Industry experience gives comfort. Strategic capability gives momentum.
The issue is: you’re asking the right question for the wrong discipline.
Industry experience matters, but it matters differently
If you’re hiring a marketing agency to execute campaigns, knowing your industry matters immensely. They need to understand your media landscape, your audience’s behavior, your competitive tactics. Industry experience helps them work faster and smarter because marketing draws its power from precedent. It optimizes patterns that have proven effective.
Branding is different. Branding draws its power from perspective. It’s a different discipline entirely.
Marketing optimizes visibility. Branding defines meaning. And you can’t optimize meaning. You have to define it.
What configuration means
Branding determines whether your sales team and website tell the same story. Whether your operations and messaging deliver the same promise. Whether your hiring practices and positioning reinforce or contradict each other. Whether your pricing and value align in what they imply.
That’s configuration. It’s about system design. It changes how your organization makes decisions, attracts talent, and competes. When done right, it doesn’t just make you look different. It makes achieving your results easier.
Flying to Reno
It might feel reassuring to know your pilot has flown into Reno before—that’s the kind of familiarity that helps with execution, with navigating known patterns. But branding isn’t about executing a known route. So wouldn’t you feel better knowing you’re flying with someone who’s experienced in various weather conditions? They know how to react when a flight doesn’t go as planned. They know what to prioritize if they lose a critical system mid-flight. They have a process for when the answer isn’t obvious.
Those questions reveal capability. The other reveals only familiarity.
Why industry fluency can sabotage branding
Industry experience rewards pattern recognition. Over time, those patterns become prescriptions. The agency stops questioning them. They see a problem and reach for what worked before because it did work. For someone else—in the past.
Familiarity is a retrospective skill. It’s built on what’s worked. But branding is a prospective discipline. It defines what will work next.
Marketing repeats and refines patterns that have proven effective. Branding invents the new patterns marketing will later optimize. That’s why industry familiarity, while valuable in marketing, can tether your branding to the logic of what’s known.
An agency that’s too embedded in your industry brings the same assumptions everyone else has. They’ll recommend what worked for your competitor because that’s what they know. They may miss the strategic openings precisely because they see the industry the way everyone else does.
To create something distinctive, you sometimes need strategic naïveté: just enough distance to see what insiders no longer notice.
Unknowing as a discipline
Great branding isn’t a prediction of the future. It’s creating the conditions where the right future become possible. That takes strategic imagination, not inherited habits.
You don’t need someone who knows your industry’s habits. You need someone who can see beyond them. Someone with the interpretive intelligence to identify the hidden patterns shaping your industry, not just operate within them.
That’s a trained practice: systematic curiosity under uncertainty. It’s the ability to ask “Does it have to be this way?” not because they don’t understand the rules, but because they understand which rules are serving you and which are holding you back.
The right questions to ask
If industry experience isn’t the right lens for evaluating a branding agency, what is?
Start with how they work, not where they’ve worked.
How do they conduct research and discovery?
What happens when they get a room full of stakeholders who can’t agree on anything? How do they navigate that?
When they need to bring in outside perspectives, how do they do it without turning the process into a slog?
How do they get a team excited about the work, not just willing to approve it?
Then get specific about what you’re dealing with.
Maybe you’ve got a fifteen-person board and getting them aligned feels impossible.
Have they worked through something like that?
Maybe you’re trying to speak to two different audiences with one brand.
How have they handled that kind of tension?
Did it work?
Ask them what they believe branding is.
Is it about crafting the perfect message?
Do they think the goal is to convince people to buy, or to create the conditions where buying you makes sense?
These conversations tell you what you need to know: whether this agency has the thinking, the process, and the resilience to solve your problems. Not whether they’ve worked with companies that look like yours.
Why capability beats familiarity
The future of your brand can’t be built by people whose best arguments come from the past.
Your branding agency needs to understand how decisions happen (instantly, emotionally, through pattern recognition, not through logical analysis). They need to know how to design conditions, not just messages. They need the capability to configure your business (from operations to culture to market positioning) so that your value becomes obvious without having to be argued.
That capability doesn’t come from working with companies like yours. It comes from disciplined thinking, rigorous process, and the resilience to solve problems that don’t have obvious answers.
The marketer’s advantage is experience. The brand strategist’s advantage is the ability to reimagine experience.
Choose accordingly.
If you’re considering how to choose your next brand partner, start here: How State of Assembly works