<aside> 🚨 From time to time clients approach us who require a little bit of interrogation. If the prospect of working with a contentious client arises, we will:
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To read more on our current accounts, see here.
The beauty of working at a design agency is that you never know who’s going to call next. It could be your beloved local cinema or it could be a team from NASA. The variety of people in need of our services means that we get to work on some incredible projects for dream clients. It also means we have to work out which projects to turn down.
The excellent 2003 documentary The Corporation makes the case that if the behaviours of a corporation were exhibited by an individual person, their psychological diagnosis would be one of psychopathy. The majority of corporations exhibit many of the symptoms of psychopathy: indifference to the feelings of others, inability to maintain long-term relationships, repeated deception of others for personal gain, failure to conform to social or legal norms, inability to experience guilt… we could go on.
We believe that this psychopathic behaviour has led to the dominance of business interests over state and planet. In turn, this dominance has become a driving force behind inequality and climate change, the two most pressing challenges facing the world. This matters to us as individuals, but also as an agency — because we’re sincere about using our creativity to make a positive impact.
We want to work with partners who share our beliefs, but it’s hard to trust a psychopath if they tell you they’re going to behave. When we meet a prospective client, we have to call as to whether they’re the right fit — usually by assessing their fundamental business model. Our own business model also come into play. HAA is a fully-accredited B Corp, a responsibility that demands we balance planet, people, profit and purpose in everything we do.
All of this means a lot of difficult decisions to make every time we answer the phone. To help, we’ve set up a framework that helps us navigate the complex landscape of business whenever we take on a new client. Here’s how it works:
Primary industries harvest or extract raw materials from nature. This includes coffee, meat, fish, tobacco, mining, and oil and gas extraction. It has always seemed clear to us that, with all due respect to those industries, we’d rather they weren’t our clients.
Why? Because we believe that extracting from the earth is something that technology is helping us to move beyond, and we’d prefer to reserve our energies for those who are doing just that. We wouldn’t work with a company mass-producing meat, but we would work with someone developing plant-based meat substitutes. We wouldn’t work with those extracting oil and gas for energy, but we’d certainly work with the renewable energy sector.
Secondary industries convert the raw materials provided by primary industry into products for consumers to buy. This includes anything from aerospace, arms and automotive to the chemical, electrical, food and textile industries. We’d still (sorry guys) prefer not to work with these industries.
Why? Because we believe that big business has some way to go before its supply chains are truly sustainable and inclusive. Globalised business practices currently marginalise too many people, so we’d prefer to keep our distance.
Tertiary industries are where things start to get interesting. These include the service sector, telecommunications, entertainment and internet services, many of whom are our clients.
By the time we get to quaternary industries (financial and professional services plus charities, NGOs and other knowledge economy organisations) we’re in ideal client territory. But even in these sectors we have to do some real digging before saying “yes” to work.