Shuichiro Ogawa
日本語

Notes · updated 2026-10-07

Why Buyers Purchase Design Consulting and How They Choose: Differences from Consulting in General and Changes since 2024 (from Industry Sources)

This note narrows the previous study of why buyers purchase consulting and how they choose to design consulting (outsourced brand, product, UX, and service design).

Contents (8)
  1. Does the answer for consulting in general hold for design?
  2. The same four reasons for going outside, with different weights
  3. The deciding factors: evidence of partnership, understanding, and chemistry, with price not near the top
  4. Public-sector buyers have written down how they complement capability and what they evaluate
  5. Why these factors decide
  6. What has been shaken since 2024
  7. Where this account does not apply
  8. Footnotes

Does the answer for consulting in general hold for design?

This note is about industry practice and follows Consulting Proposals and Competitive Bids: Their Forms, Why Buyers Award and Sellers Win, and What Generative AI Changes (from Industry Sources) and Why Buyers Purchase Consulting and How They Choose: Reasons, Deciding Factors, and the Mechanisms Behind Them (from Industry Sources). The previous note divided the reasons why buyers purchase consulting in general into four groups: expertise the organization lacks, a shortage of staff and the need for speed, an outside perspective and independent review, and assets no one else has. It also proposed four hypotheses about how the deciding factors work. Because quality cannot be verified before purchase, buyers choose by people, track record, and relationships; time pressure and the weight of procedures make incumbent suppliers the default; outside review and unique data are chosen to justify decisions; and because the internal capability gap is structural, buyers keep buying.

This note narrows the scope to outsourced design (brand, product, UX, and service design). It examines whether the four reasons and the four hypotheses hold for design, and where they diverge.

Few buyer surveys focus on design1. The main source is What Clients Think 2024, in which the research firm Up to the Light, working with the UK Design Business Association (DBA), interviewed 675 people responsible for buying creative services, from brand managers to chief executives (Up to the Light 2024). To this the note adds a survey on in-house agencies by the US Association of National Advertisers (ANA), a survey on agency remuneration by the UK advertisers’ association ISBA, and statements by in-house design leaders and CMOs.

The same four reasons for going outside, with different weights

What Clients Think 2024 lists, in order, the advantages that buyers mentioned most for using an external agency rather than in-house creative resources (Up to the Light 2024). First is wider experience to draw upon: an agency is not locked into one sector and brings reference points learned from many brands and markets. Second is a greater willingness to challenge: buyers hope and expect that an outside firm will challenge more and bring a different perspective. Third is breadth of skills. Conversely, the advantages of in-house creative resources were, in order, cheaper cost, deeper immersion in the brand and organization, and clearer accountability. The report also notes that in-house resources can easily “go native.”

Mapped onto the previous four reasons, expertise (breadth of skills) and an outside perspective (challenge) remain as they were. In design, the outside perspective weighs enough to rank second. The asset no one else has, which for consulting in general was proprietary data and benchmarks, becomes in design the experience accumulated across many sectors and brands.

The staffing reason also remains. In ANA’s 2023 survey (162 members), 82% of members had an in-house agency, up from 78% in 2018, 58% in 2013, and 42% in 2008 (ANA 2023). Even so, 92% also worked with external agencies, and work went to them primarily for bandwidth reasons, when the in-house agency was too busy, or for capabilities that did not exist internally. In What Clients Think 2024, 46% of buyers had access to in-house creative resources, and 95% of them still saw value in using external agencies for particular challenges (Up to the Light 2024). At Bayer’s consumer health business, a 15-strong in-house design team uses Interbrand and Design Bridge as its strategic partners (Dowdy 2025).

On the academic side, Filippetti and D’Ippolito, in a multiple-case study of Italian manufacturing, write that firms in design-intensive industries increasingly collaborate with external designers rather than undertaking design in-house (Filippetti and D’Ippolito 2017).

The deciding factors: evidence of partnership, understanding, and chemistry, with price not near the top

The same report lists the top three things buyers look for in new business presentations (Up to the Light 2024). The first is evidence of real client and agency partnership: not a list of what the agency did, but how it worked closely with the client and what difference the relationship made. The second is the ability to answer big strategic challenges, being an agency that is consulted rather than simply briefed, and the third is commercial effectiveness. The top five reasons for winning a pitch were, in order, a clear and memorable message, a great team (good people chemistry), “they got it,” a more tailored approach, and more effort. “They got it” means that the agency showed that it really understood the client’s particular challenges and anxieties.

The buyers’ own words point to the same things. The design leader at Bayer’s consumer health business said that agencies should call out a poor brief and own up if they lack the breadth of capabilities or the best talent currently available (Dowdy 2025). The design director at Wise asked agencies to be curious and inquisitive about the challenge the in-house team faces, and described working literally side by side with the external firm in Figma files during the rebrand. The CMO of ClearCo named as deciding factors an agency that was not only creative but had also seen companies through the same stage of growth, together with the rigor and structure of how it ran projects (Focus Lab 2026). The CMO of Contentstack named experience handling the end-to-end project, a partner that would treat the company as its most important customer, put in the effort to understand it, make bold recommendations and then listen to feedback, and support after launch (Focus Lab 2025).

Price is near the top of none of these lists. Compared with the previous note, where the top factor for consulting in general moved among reputation, experience, people, and existing relationships in Hinge’s surveys, design brings understanding (“they got it”) and chemistry to the front.

Public-sector buyers have written down how they complement capability and what they evaluate

In the public sector, guidance documents state why design is bought from outside and how suppliers are chosen. In a 2020 guide, the US General Services Administration (GSA) wrote that many high-impact federal service providers asked to improve customer experience did not have in-house expertise to perform human-centered design methods, so it set out to make it easier for them to find partners outside government (GSA 2020). The guide’s evaluation points, synthesized from 108 responses by firms, ask for a clear description of the firm’s human-centered design methodology, at least one in-depth case study, and examples of deliverables. As points of caution, it lists pitching a pre-packaged solution, case studies with no clear indication of how the firm’s work contributed to a measurable outcome, and open-ended maintenance projects that last for years without defined goals. The guide encourages buyers to ask first what should be done in-house and what should be contracted, and to shape contractor relationships so that they build the agency’s capacity.

The evaluation guidance for the UK government’s digital procurement framework (Digital Outcomes and Specialists) had buyers score suppliers on technical competence, cultural fit, and price (Government Digital Service 2019). Cultural fit refers to how well the buyer and the supplier work together, and its weighting had to be between 5% and 20%. This guidance was withdrawn in December 2025 as out of date, and the weightings for the current framework could not be confirmed. The chemistry that private buyers named as a reason for winning pitches was thus written into UK public procurement as a scored criterion.

In Japan, at a November 2024 meeting on revising service design guidelines, the Digital Agency answered that securing people with professional qualifications in human-centered design would be ideal, but that such people are scarce in the public sector and procurement could fail if this were required (Digital Agency 2024). At a February 2026 meeting, members said that procurement should value the process and not only the deliverables, with the buyer moving forward and learning together with the supplier (Digital Agency 2026).

Why these factors decide

When the previous four hypotheses are applied to design, the first becomes stronger, the second and third change form, and the fourth moves in the opposite direction. None of them has been measured directly; at this stage, several sources point in the same direction.

The inability to verify quality before purchase works more strongly in design

In What Clients Think 2024, 73% of buyers stated that design effectiveness is difficult to quantify (Up to the Light 2024). In the same report, 73% found it difficult to differentiate between agencies in new business presentations, 58% had experienced too many case studies, and 64% said that presentations tend to be too long. In the following year’s report, 66% said that agency case studies fail to tell them what they need to know (Design Business Association 2025). When outcomes cannot be measured in advance and proposals do not reveal differences, the cues left to the buyer are the sense that the agency got the problem and the chemistry of the team they would work with. The appearance of “they got it” and chemistry among the top reasons for winning pitches is consistent with this view.

On the academic side, Sporrong, in a study of public procurement of architectural and engineering consultants, states that buying professional services is difficult because of the intangible nature of services, information asymmetry between client and supplier, and customer inexperience (Sporrong 2011). As a result, clients traditionally rely on long-term relations or recommendations, and Sporrong summarizes prior studies as showing a low importance of price. In Filippetti and D’Ippolito’s cases as well, the main mechanism for gaining the benefits of collaboration with external designers was long-term relationships based on knowledge sharing and trust (Filippetti and D’Ippolito 2017).

Design can show part of the work before the contract

In consulting in general, the deliverables do not exist when the contract is signed. In design, by showing creative work in a pitch, the agency lets the buyer see part of the outcome before the contract. In the same survey, a pitch is seen as good business practice for projects with bigger budgets that set the brand’s direction and must succeed, and 65% of buyers felt that the winning pitch was more polished (Up to the Light 2024).

This approach has a cost. The DBA advises buyers that choosing an agency based on unpaid creative work presented in a pitch is not a good way to find the best agency, because the quality of the creative only reflects the time the agency spent on the pitch (Design Business Association n.d.). This is a statement of position by the agencies’ association, not a survey finding. Kennedy discusses spec work competitions in design, which have people produce work without a guarantee of payment, and takes a critical view of the form in which amateurs and professionals compete for the same job (Kennedy 2013). In design, the second hypothesis (time pressure and the weight of procedures) appears as a tug of war between buyers who want to see the work before choosing and sellers who bear its cost.

The justification of decisions turns toward proof of commercial effectiveness rather than independence

In consulting in general, outside independent review and comparative data served to justify decisions inside the organization. What design buyers use for justification is commercial effectiveness. Commercial effectiveness is among the top three things buyers look for in new business presentations (Up to the Light 2024), and in the 2025 report, 77% of clients stressed an increased need for creative work to demonstrate a return on investment (Design Business Association 2025). In the same report, 55% said that internal challenges are more pressing than external ones, and 52% were challenged by the need to convince internal stakeholders. The US GSA guide’s caution about case studies that do not show a contribution to a measurable outcome is the public-sector form of the same demand (GSA 2020). The effect of design is hard to express in numbers, yet buyers are asked for numbers inside their organizations. This gap likely explains why buyers want evidence of effect in case studies and choose agencies that can speak to commercial effectiveness.

Internal capability in design is being rebuilt

In consulting in general, UK departments kept using consultants for the same reasons for 15 years. In design, by contrast, buyers have built up internal capability. The share of ANA members with an in-house agency rose from 42% to 82% over 15 years, and 65% had moved some work from external agencies to their in-house agency in the past three years (ANA 2023). The top benefit of the in-house agency was cost efficiency.

The head of brand and creative at Careem said that the business was moving so fast that the company did not feel it could find an external partner with the understanding to support it, and so decided to build the brand in-house (Cousins 2024). The vice president of design for Europe at PepsiCo said that the in-house team works daily with marketing, insights, commercial, R&D, and legal, so it is not designing in isolation (Dowdy 2025).

In the Design Council’s 2010 research in the UK, 51% of the £15 billion spent on design was design consultancies’ fee income, and in-house teams’ budgets accounted for 25% (Design Council 2010). In the Design Economy 2026, around 80% of designers work in non-design industries, and from 2020 to 2025 the employment of designers in non-design industries grew by 20%, against 6% in design industries (Design Council 2026a). The Design Council interprets this as a sign that organizations are bringing design capability in-house. The two studies measure different things (spending in 2010, industry of employment in 2026), and their shares cannot be joined directly. The FAQ for the 2026 report lists, among possible explanations for the fall in the number of design firms, the increasing use of designers within non-design businesses rather than specialist design firms, alongside scaling up and mergers (Design Council 2026b). A procurement official in the Canadian government likewise acknowledged that service designers and researchers are in high demand and take time to recruit, and recommended building internal capacity by developing staff (Franco 2019).

In design, external agencies are shifting from replacing internal staff to complementing internal capability and challenging from outside. The previous fourth hypothesis (buying repeatedly because of a structural gap) fits design poorly.

What has been shaken since 2024

Buyers expect AI to bring down the cost of outside agencies. In What Clients Think 2024, 89% stated that AI offers huge potential for brand marketing, 80% stated that their own use of AI was still at an early stage, and 74% expected AI to have a downward effect on agency costs over the next few years (Up to the Light 2024). Buyers expect agencies to use AI as a tool that can speed up creative options and processes. The share of buyers who considered their agency good value for money fell from 66% in 2014 to 48% in 2022 and 45% in 2024, and was 45% again in 2025 (Up to the Light 2024; Design Business Association 2025). In ISBA’s 2024 survey, 8% of members had amended agency contracts to include terms for the use of AI, and a further 42% were in progress (ISBA 2024). Only 27% said that payment by results had changed agency performance for the better.

In the buyers’ own words, the CMO of Klarna said in 2024 that most current creative processes are extremely frustrating to everyone (Monllos 2024). The CMO described how the company might once spend three weeks and $100,000 before seeing an idea and possibly not liking it, whereas it now sketches the idea within an hour and looks at it jointly. Reckitt’s global brand experience and design lead for nutrition described the growing pressure on in-house teams to deliver more, faster and leaner, without compromising on quality (Dowdy 2025).

In the public sector, the UK government’s 2025 review stated that of the £26 billion public sector digital and data spend in 2023, 55% went to contractors, managed service providers, and IT consultants and less than 20% to permanent staff (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology 2025). The review added that less than a third of leaders believe the current balance of internal resources and external support is cost-effective or efficient. These figures cover digital work in general, not design alone. In the United States, an executive order of August 2025 established a National Design Studio to advise agencies on how to reduce duplicative design costs (Executive Office of the President 2025).

On the academic side, the abstract of Wahid and colleagues states that generative AI challenges traditional relationships between content marketing agencies and their clients and moves agencies from execution-based services to expertise-driven roles such as creative consulting (Wahid et al. 2025).

This suggests a hypothesis for the period since 2024. AI makes pitch creative and production cheaper. If showing ideas costs less, the polish that set winning pitches apart loses force as a deciding factor. Public-sector guidance (the US GSA and the UK framework) also lists a clear human-centered design methodology, measurable outcomes, and cultural fit among its evaluation points. The deciding factor then moves toward what design buyers already valued: the ability to challenge from outside, the sense that the agency got the problem, and proof of commercial effectiveness. This points in the same direction as the hypothesis in the note before last, that in consulting in general the gap between proposal documents narrows and the weight of selection moves outside the document. This hypothesis would be wrong if, after AI becomes widely used, the polish of pitch work continued to decide buyers’ choices.

Where this account does not apply

What Clients Think, the main source, aggregates surveys that agencies paid for to ask their own clients; it includes brand and advertising agencies and does not give figures for design consulting alone. The composition of each year’s sample is not disclosed, so the trend in the share who consider their agency good value for money can be read only as a tendency. ANA and ISBA are associations of advertisers, and their surveys cover advertising and marketing production.

For outsourced UX and service design, public-sector guidance and meeting records show how it is handled, but no source measuring it from the buyer’s side with a stated method was obtained. Two of the CMOs’ statements on choosing a firm appeared in the chosen design firm’s own media, where accounts favorable to the chosen side are more likely to survive. For Japan, no buyer sources other than the Digital Agency’s meeting records could be obtained. Acquisitions of design firms by technology companies were reported in 2016 as numbering 42 since 2004, about half of them in the previous 12 months, with Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, and Facebook as the most acquisitive buyers (Design Week 2016), but no source measuring the later effect on how buyers choose was found.

Unverified items

No unverified statement remains in the main claims. Sources that could not be reached (the original of NN/g’s 2020 survey of UX practitioners, agency surveys by Forrester and WFA, figures from Edelman and eMarketer, the originals of surveys by DMI, JIDA, KIDP, and the Japan Patent Office on design-driven management, and the full texts of Bruce and Docherty 1993 and Kimbell 2011) are recorded in the ledger with the routes attempted.

References

Footnotes

  1. The sources are sorted into three tiers: public bodies (T1), the factual parts of surveys by industry associations and research firms (T2), and statements by the people who placed the orders (T3). What Clients Think aggregates surveys that individual agencies paid Up to the Light to conduct with their own clients, and it covers advertising and brand agencies as well. Its figures are not specific to design and lean toward the clients of existing relationships. ANA and ISBA are associations of advertisers, and their surveys cover advertising and marketing production. Two of the CMOs’ statements on choosing a design firm come from transcripts of podcasts produced by the design firm that was chosen. Academic articles were used in full text when it could be obtained and otherwise within the scope of their abstracts. The ledger is at source/review/design-consulting-buyers/industry.md. ↩

Author: Shuichiro Ogawa (Design Researcher / Consultant) About me →