A nice&frank Guide to Intentional Honesty

During its first two years of operation, New York-based indie agency nice&frank has been helping its clients be more honest. But while everyone claims they want honesty, says co-founder and CSO Graham North, it’s a learned skill that requires confidence.

“Honesty is hard, messy and vulnerable. It challenges your business, and sometimes your personal identity. But clients who are confident can receive hard truths without being shaken by them. We use the mantra ‘strong opinions, loosely held’ as the high watermark – provoke the room with your hottest take, and then listen like you're wrong so that we can all get closer to the truth… The holy trinity of honest clients is confidence, humility, and the genuine curiosity to get to the bottom of the problem.”

To facilitate honest conversations with its clients, nice&frank offers a practice called ‘FrankShop’. “It's a six-week truth-finding sprint, leading up to a two-day, no-phones, raw-as-hell C-suite strategic alignment session,” explains Graham. “Most of our clients call it ‘brand therapy’.”

Following six weeks of research, including extensive anonymised interviews with up to 30 or 40 client employees, the two-day FrankShop puts executives in a room together and uses ‘little touches to nudge client and agency back towards honesty’. These activities range from custom podcast briefings to timed, word-bound exercises like the self-explanatory ‘I Love You Guys, But…’. 

“Day one is about provoking all of those uncomfortable truths. And day two is about making a decision while the context is fresh in everybody's minds. The big difference maker for us is [the C-suite] making the decision in the room. You remember the day when the CEO, CMO and CFO all made the decision. Then you go forward [together], as opposed to when things are debated; ‘let's do iterations of this’, ‘I kind of fell out of love with it’... We really do a job of forcing the five year-plus organising idea in the room with folks, which we found makes a pretty significant difference.”

A Frank History

The team has been developing FrankShop for 10 years, starting at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners as ‘Brand Camp’ - a kind of 48-hour ‘hackathon’ to quickly create brand platforms for start-ups in Silicon Valley. Some of Graham’s big brand clients saw this and asked to try working in a similar fashion, which he found “more transformational” than working with the smaller brands. 

“They are living in the chaotic corporate environment of being too careful about what you say and protecting your political standing. The ability to get the leadership into a room was the unlock,” says Graham. “The truth is that most of us want to be more honest, but the corporate muscle memory gets in the way. Our process is designed to nudge us back towards saying what we actually mean. And as soon as those nudges open the door, most people are willing to be more forthright. For Stanford, the ability to get the leadership into a room was the unlock,” says Graham.

nice&frank has now worked with clients including Lay's, Ruffles, Pepsi, Häagen-Dazs, Les Mills, Stanford, the San Francisco Giants and continues to evolve the FrankShop process.

Evolving FrankShop: Becoming More Frank

Having once relied more on prompt-based exercises, broad questions and brainstorming, FrankShop now embodies nice&frank’s mantra: ‘strong opinions, loosely held’. Instead of a traditional category audit, for example, the CCO (Laura Petruccelli) might give off-the-cuff hot takes about different campaigns - “and as soon as the client starts to lean in, that's where the true collaboration comes.”

“It probably started with a little bit more of a kumbaya-camp fire vibe, but now we actually have a really uncomfortable conversation that's rooted in insights we've learned from the client and consumer,” says Graham. “That's given us more authority to have a slightly more uncomfortable conversation, but usually a much more productive one.”

He adds, “If we come in with no opinion and wrestle with it, we're not really going to get very far. What's better is to come in with a strong opinion. We're not saying it's the right answer, but it needs to be strong and sharp.” 

While he admits there’s no silver bullet, Graham says FrankShop cultivates a space that promotes trust, rigour and fun, making sure that every nugget of honesty is very clearly in service of one common goal: “Grow the brand like hell.”

He explains, “The honesty is couched in real truth through rigorous research - what someone once called ‘interrogating the brand within an inch of its life’. We distill that data into our ‘frank’ takes, which makes it feel less like armchair quarterbacking and hot takes, and more like a look in the mirror that is worth working through.”

The team also normalises the use of two phrases to help challenge things or reveal uncomfortable truths. The terms, ‘to be frank’ and ‘quiet part loud’, Graham says, “Get the niceties out of the way so that we can solve the real problem that doesn't always make its way into the brief.”

“Internally, it's been incredibly refreshing to find little ways to help us all be more honest with each other… [It’s] a permission slip to say the uncomfortable thing that is sitting in your stomach.”

Making FrankShops Even Nicer

Graham believes that making truth-telling a little more fun is underrated. And so, FrankShop now involves GIFs, games and plenty of comic relief. “When everyone can have a laugh, we can all face the uncomfortable stuff with lighter shoulders.”

To curate this environment, nice&frank no longer runs FrankShops in clients’ offices, nor in any boardroom, for that matter. This is all in the pursuit of “living room honesty”, helping brand execs ‘feel like real people’ without the need to ‘posture’. In an Airbnb, for example, the team will surround the room - when possible - with the clients’ products, prompting them to rediscover their own consumer passion. 

Other shake-ups include bringing the customers’ real voices into the room - recently playing recordings of kids talking about farts, for one client - “to shift their mindset in terms of what kids think is funny”. 

Other participants have been made to wear colourful socks. And different types of furniture and background music have been brought in to enhance comfort. Even the group chat during digital meetings becomes affectionately termed ‘the dance floor’, where emojis, quips and ideas fly to create a safe environment for conversation. 

Each FrankShop is bespoke - a unique experience curated through what Graham and the team dub ‘vibe design’... Although the team has to ensure it doesn’t go overboard.

“If it feels decontextualised from the business problem, or the invisible power dynamics of this group, ‘forced fun’ becomes: ‘Why are you wasting my time?’. But if we know your culture is black socks, and we need a different mindset today, then we're not going to let you wear black socks. Or if we're talking about this [product] being the best tasting chip in the world, then we're not actually going to solve anything if we're not eating it right now and sharing what we love about it.”

He continues, “It’s fun in service of actually meeting the team and the business problem where they are. People say, ‘I've never felt this way in a brand strategy meeting or in a corporate environment before’. That sounds fluffy, until you realise that this feeling is the step change between cagey corporate defensiveness and leaning into honesty.”

FrankStops: Overcoming Honesty Roadblocks

Different people view honesty in different ways. Some take a therapeutic or devil’s advocate approach - others are more blunt and dry. Some say they like honesty, but freeze up in its presence. For this reason, Graham says that FrankShop involves a diversity of truth-telling techniques, and primes the client relationship up front to avoid ‘truth-bombing’ people without nuance, or in the most emotionally intense and high-stakes moments down the line. “At which point, hard truths feel much, much harder to hear.”

Honesty can trigger a defensive response, he explains, especially from senior executives who aren’t used to being challenged, or when people are afraid of making the subsequent changes - the fear of ‘what does this mean now for the organisation?’.

“Our whole point is that the risks posed by indecision are underestimated, especially if the business is trending downwards,” says Graham. “Our job is to really minimise how hard that transition will be. So the back end of a FrankShop is like a live playbook, where everybody at the organisation can take the idea that we landed on and say, ‘OK, what does this mean for marketing, for design, for sales?’. So anybody that's touching the brand can now make a step change towards that thing.”

To assist with this, the agency has borrowed influences from the world of modern psychology; Brené Brown, author of ‘The Power of Vulnerability’; Priya Parker, who wrote about how to be productive and intentional in ‘The Art of Gathering’; and Daniel Kahneman, who has been a big influence in terms of bias recognition.

“You have to acknowledge that people are people, and that most corporate environments are designed to oppress human psychology in favour of business psychology,” says Graham. “Businesses are just boxes with people in them, and we have to do a better job of acknowledging and then designing around that.”

After FrankShop

Lasting just six weeks, FrankShop is a far more accelerated trust building exercise than signing an AOR relationship paper, and although it sometimes leads to that, Graham shares that the biggest thing is “a normalisation of an honest brokering of information.”

“To feel like you've been in the trenches with someone who deeply understands and cares about your business, and who also understands the dynamics, you start to normalise truth telling… For the most part, it's a lot more like flossing than dental surgery, because we’ve normalised even these little bits of language: ‘Quiet part loud’, ‘to be frank’, etc.” Because of that, the client also feels an extraordinary amount of permission to reciprocate this honesty with the nice&frank team, and its own employees, going forward. 

In the month following a FrankShop, the participating C-suite members present the full story, research and learnings to their organisation, removing the friction and getting everyone on board. “Of course, it's usually rooted in a truth that the company always believed,” says Graham. “It just didn't articulate or reinforce it.”

And after 10 years of running over 100 FrankShops - in its current form or as ‘Brand Camps’ at Goodby - the most significant impact he sees is often not the immediate resulting creative work from the brand, but the behavioural change internally. “We'll find out two years later that the [FrankShop] organising idea sparked a junior person to come up with an idea.”

Finding FrankShoppers

nice&frank’s biggest ongoing question is how it finds and fosters clients with that “holy trinity”  of confidence, humility and genuine curiosity. From the jump with a new client, Graham explains that it’s all about testing how well they react to raw honesty, rather than the “song and dance” of discussing the likes of awards and prior success.

“Let's talk about the problem. How willing and articulate are you about the nature of it? Are you aware of where you should be confident and where you're not confident at all? One of the biggest red flags for us is ‘Kool Aid energy’. If you're just like, ‘We're the best in the category at this or that’... your competitor would probably say the same thing. That's a really, really big problem for us.” 

“We want people to raise their hands because they want this sort of thing,” he says. “If this doesn't seem appealing to you, it's really bad because we're going to provoke the shit out of you. That’s why confidence matters. Indecision in those rooms and a lack of point of view just results in overwhelm, as opposed to action.”

“But confident people, who hear honesty, wrestle with trade-offs, and say, ‘Thank God, we got to that, and now let's go’ - those are the best clients ever,” he adds. “We can obviously do amazing creative work on the back end of that, but they can often transform their entire organisations because they know exactly what to do with this. If we can get a read on people like that, then it's just the best relationship ever.”