How to de-risk buying creative services

Internal or external, delivering creative projects for brand extension can be one of the riskiest investment decisions of the year. New targets are being set. Budgets are being signed off. Creative is often tasked with unlocking growth with little risk. So how do you de-risk creative? I’d argue: start by looking at the constraints.

Real creativity doesn’t start with a blank page

The first time I really understood my creative path was during a live brief at St Martins. Kronenbourg 1664 asked the MA students to design a range of T-shirts. That external constraint - designing for a brand - was the first time the process clicked for me*. Design has rules. And constraint is where good design starts.

As iPhone creator Jonny Ive put it, design is “a thousand no’s for every yes”. And while most licensing briefs don’t need that many ‘no’s’, they do need you to embrace constraint. Because constraint is everywhere.

The myth of creative freedom

In licensing and brand extension, there’s no such thing as a clean slate. Every project starts with constraints. The best briefs highlight them. The best teams work with them not against them.

IP brings a rich set of boundaries. Rules around story, audience, format, and tone. You can view them as limitation but they’re the material we work with. We’ve seen the same five types of constraint show up again and again.

Five kinds of constraint that matter

Structural. Your design has to work within a known system. LEGO is an obvious example but the same logic applies to Transformers’ play mechanic, or the consistency of miniatures in tabletop gaming or train set play patterns. For brand extension you can play with abstraction to make the familiar seem new. Or addition, laying trend elements into familiar iconography to play with convention.

Brand. You’re designing inside a brand universe with rules on symbols, tone, and behaviour. We’re in the familiar territory of guidelines, colour palettes, typography and tone of voice. In brand extension and licensing you’re interpreting all of this in new ways for new consumers. That’s what allows scale without chaos. Brand constraints can take time to change, thats why it’s wise to bring stakeholders along with you.

Cultural. Fans have rules too. You can’t break canon without consequences - until you can and then it ok. Fans act as constraint and inspiration. They’re often remixing any number of brand codes well ahead of what the brand gatekeepers consider acceptable. You could look at the demand for Hot Wheels Transformers as an example of both. This was dreamt of by fans long before those two toy juggernauts turned around and made it happen. On the flip side fans can also be a toxic restraint or drag on creativity - adding Elves of Colour into Tolkien’s Middle Earth lore is seen as woke. Negative review bombing is the result.

Commercial. Creative decisions must survive organisational politics and internal buy-in. This is about navigating legal, marketing, and leadership tensions on the one hand. But also about internal culture, resistance to brave ideas that consumers are well ahead of, or simply IP protection. Or organisation changes that alter its priorities and culture. Smart creatives allow for all of that, but only with a dedicated and courageous client or senior cheerleader that pushes ideas through.

Human. Status perception, age targeting and purchase motivation all shape brand extension strategy. At its simplest this about correct targeting - making decisions about who the brand is for and what their expectations of it are. How to meet consumers in the right place at the right time with the right product at the right price.

Creative teams - good to great

Once you assume a baseline of talent and trust, what sets great teams apart is how they handle constraint.

• Ask better questions. Challenge the brief. Push for clarity. Look for what’s missing. Teams that skip this step tend to deliver what was asked for not what’s needed.
• Say no when it counts. Not to be difficult but to protect the quality of the outcome. Can you point to a time your team pushed back and it improved the outcome?
• Be experts. Being ‘passionate about creativity’ isn’t a perspective. A good creative team knows what kind of work it believes in, and why. You’re solving a problem. A dentists success isn’t measured on their passion for teeth. They spot problems and fix it. Painlessly if possible.

Passion and creativity are entry points, expertise is the differentiator, successfully managing constraints is the proof.

Contraint In Action

We were recently working for Hasbro on a collaboration between Play-Doh and Pantone’s Colour of the Year. Any time you work on a collab constraint can increase. Two or three brands coming together with multiple stakeholders means striking a balance on audience, targeting, strategy, alignment, creative and delivery.

I can’t lay out the project here but I can give you one example of an approach. Sometimes having the confidence to hold up a mirror for the client allows them to see what familiarity can sometimes obscure.

Pantone’s 2026 Colour of the Year - Cloud Dancer - is a calming shade of white. You may not think white is an obvious fit with the primary colours and self-expression that are essential parts of the Play-Doh brand. But collaborations are all about sharing audiences, a chance to try on each-others clothes. Play-Doh started life as a wallpaper cleaning compound. An all-white product, made for adults in a professional context. A simple observation that links colour to origin story. But a simple observation is possibly all you need to unlock a new way of thinking about opportunity.

The best creative work doesn’t always add anything new. Its starts by showing you something old in a way you hadn’t seen. Thats turning a constraint into the beginnings of strategy.

What have we learned?

Some briefs are executional. Others involve competing constraints and unclear trade-offs. When the path isn’t obvious, fluency in constraint is what reduces risk.

If you’re a creative leader, part of a team or in the process of buying creative services, ask yourself: how do we approach constraint? Do we challenge assumptions? Spot tensions? Identify the gaps that matter?

High-performing teams use constraint to sharpen the work, strengthen the brief and effectively deliver objectives.