Most people outside fashion probably couldn’t pick Bob Mackie out of a line-up.

They’d know his work, though.

They’ve seen Cher covered in feathers, beads and sequins. They’ve seen Elton John dressed with absolutely no intention of blending into the background. They might remember Carol Burnett walking down a staircase wearing a curtain, complete with the curtain rod still across her shoulders.

Mackie was behind all of it.

He died last week at the age of 87 after a career that stretched across more than five decades and helped create some of entertainment’s most recognisable visual identities. His client list included Cher, Elton John, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Carol Burnett and a frankly ridiculous number of other famous names.

There’s something interesting about that from a business perspective.

Mackie spent his career making other people impossible to ignore. In doing so, he quietly made himself impossible to replace.

For any business that exists to make its clients better, there’s a pretty good lesson in there.

Your Client Is Supposed to Be the Star

This is something agencies get wrong surprisingly often.

We become so focused on demonstrating our creativity that we forget who the work is actually for.

If you’re a video agency, the objective isn’t for somebody to watch a client’s video and think, “What brilliant editing.” You want them thinking the person on screen knows what they’re talking about.

If you’re a designer, the customer shouldn’t come away talking primarily about your Photoshop skills. They should remember the business you were helping communicate.

The same applies to photographers, PR agencies, marketers, consultants, copywriters and almost every other service business.

Good work demonstrates your ability.

Great work makes the client look better.

Bob Mackie understood that extraordinarily well.

He Didn’t Just Design Clothes. He Understood the Person Wearing Them

Calling Mackie a costume designer is obviously accurate, but it doesn’t quite explain why his work became so recognisable.

He wasn’t simply making beautiful clothes and finding famous people to put inside them.

The clothes had a job to do.

With Cher, they amplified glamour, confidence and spectacle. With Elton John, subtlety was hardly the brief. With Carol Burnett, clothes could become part of the joke itself.

The famous curtain dress is probably the best example. Mackie designed it for Burnett’s 1976 Gone with the Wind parody, and the costume is now held by the Smithsonian. It worked because it wasn’t simply an impressive outfit; the ridiculous curtain rod running across Burnett’s shoulders was the joke.

That’s a very different creative mindset from asking, “How do I make this look good?”

The better question is:

“What does this person need the audience to feel?”

That question applies just as easily to a 45-second Instagram video as it does to a sequined gown.

Good Creative Work Should Feel Like the Client

This is something we think about a lot at Digital Sparks.

You could put every client in the same studio, give them the same script structure, use the same edit and send them all home with technically polished videos.

It would certainly make production easier.

It would also be incredibly boring.

The point of creating content for somebody isn’t to slowly make them sound like the agency creating it. It’s to find the interesting bits of who they already are and make those more visible.

One client might be naturally funny. Another might have twenty years of technical knowledge. Somebody else could be incredibly direct, warm, opinionated or brilliant at explaining complicated subjects simply.

That’s what you want to find.

Because if every person an agency works with ends up looking and sounding the same, the agency hasn’t really built their brands.

It’s built its own template.

You Can See the Difference Between a Style and a Formula

Mackie absolutely had a style.

Sequins, feathers, rhinestones, theatrical silhouettes and plenty of skin became part of the visual language associated with his work. Reuters noted that sparkle and humour were both central to his designs.

But Cher didn’t become Carol Burnett.

And Carol Burnett didn’t become Elton John.

That’s the distinction.

A good creative business can have standards, taste and a recognisable approach without forcing every customer through exactly the same formula.

You should be able to see the quality of the work without every piece of work looking identical.

It’s something worth considering whenever you’re outsourcing part of your own brand too. Does the agency, designer or marketer helping you actually understand what makes you distinctive? Or are you simply becoming the latest person to be pushed through their content machine?

Quality matters, but personalisation is what makes that quality useful.

The Best Case Study Is a Successful Client

There’s another side to Mackie’s career that I think is particularly relevant for agencies.

Look at how we remember him.

We remember Cher.

We remember Burnett.

We remember Diana Ross, Tina Turner and Elton John.

Then we discover that Mackie was behind so many of those moments.

That’s an incredibly powerful reputation to build.

Instead of constantly having to tell the world how creative he was, the work did it for him.

His reputation became attached to the people he’d helped look extraordinary.

Service businesses have the same opportunity.

Your website can say you’re brilliant. Your LinkedIn bio can call you an expert. Your Instagram page can explain how innovative, strategic and results-driven you are until everyone gets bored and goes home.

But nothing carries quite the same weight as being able to point at somebody else’s success and say:

“We helped build that.”

That’s why client results, testimonials and case studies matter so much. They move your marketing away from claims and towards evidence.

Your Reputation Is Being Built in Other People’s Businesses

There’s a tendency to think that brand building only happens on your own channels.

It doesn’t.

If you’re an accountant, part of your reputation is being built inside the businesses you’ve helped grow.

If you’re a recruiter, it’s being built through the careers you’ve helped develop and the teams you’ve helped companies create.

If you’re an estate agent, it’s being built every time somebody talks about how you handled their move.

And if you’re an agency, it’s being built in the content, campaigns and brands you put into the world for clients.

Your Instagram profile matters. Your website matters. Your own marketing absolutely matters.

But your work is marketing too.

Sometimes it’s the most persuasive marketing you’ve got.

Being Behind the Scenes Doesn’t Mean Being Invisible

There’s an important distinction here because I don’t think the lesson from Mackie’s career is that service businesses should disappear behind their clients.

Quite the opposite.

Mackie had a very strong brand of his own. He won nine Emmys, earned three Oscar nominations and later won a Tony for The Cher Show. His name became shorthand for a particular kind of extravagant entertainment glamour.

He was just never bigger than the person he was dressing.

That’s a useful balance.

At Digital Sparks, we obviously need to market Digital Sparks. We need people to know what we do, understand our thinking and recognise the quality of our work.

But when we’re working with a client, our job isn’t to make their content scream Digital Sparks.

It’s to make it unmistakably them.

Ironically, if you do that consistently enough, it strengthens your own reputation anyway.

People start seeing the standard across your work. They see clients showing up more confidently, looking more professional and communicating their expertise more clearly.

Eventually, somebody asks who is behind it.

That’s a far stronger introduction than you shouting about yourself.

This Is Where Social Proof Becomes So Powerful

We’ve written recently about the importance of turning client feedback into a marketing asset rather than allowing a good testimonial to disappear after one Instagram Story.

Mackie’s career is almost an extreme version of the same principle.

Every famous person who walked onto a stage in one of his costumes became evidence of what he could do.

For businesses, the scale is obviously different, but the principle isn’t.

When a client achieves something because of your work, capture it.

When they send you a brilliant message, ask whether you can use it.

When somebody tags you in something you’ve helped create, don’t automatically leave it buried in the Tagged tab.

When there’s a measurable result, turn it into a case study.

Your clients can often explain your value far more convincingly than you can.

Great Work Compounds

Mackie worked with Cher for decades.

That’s important.

He didn’t create one memorable outfit, have his moment and disappear. Their collaboration stretched across different stages of her career and helped create an aesthetic that became instantly recognisable. His work also continued finding new audiences: performers from Beyoncé to Miley Cyrus and Sabrina Carpenter have worn his designs.

That’s what reputation looks like when it compounds.

One good piece of work earns another.

One successful client introduces another.

One great relationship becomes a case study.

One case study makes the next sales conversation easier.

Businesses sometimes become so obsessed with acquisition that they overlook what’s already sitting in front of them. Your existing clients aren’t simply today’s revenue. Done properly, they’re part of tomorrow’s reputation.

The better the work you do for them, the stronger that reputation becomes.

Make Other People Look Good

There’s a wonderful simplicity to the lesson Bob Mackie leaves behind for anyone working in a service business.

You don’t always have to make yourself the centre of the story.

Make your clients brilliant.

Understand what makes them different rather than forcing them into whatever happens to be fashionable.

Create work people notice.

Build relationships that last longer than a campaign.

And make sure you’re collecting the evidence along the way.

Bob Mackie spent more than half a century making some of the biggest names in entertainment look extraordinary. By the end of it, his own name had become synonymous with the kind of work only Bob Mackie could produce.

That’s not a bad way to build a brand.