What is a decision maker?
A decision maker is the person whose approval is final. On any project there are many people with opinions, several with influence and a few with a veto, but only one or two whose yes means the work goes ahead and the invoice gets paid. For a brand campaign that might be the chief marketing officer, a brand director, a founder, or a vice president who controls the budget line. For a film it might be the head of communications; for a rebrand, the chief executive. Knowing who it is, and getting to them early, is half of what account management and new business are about.
The term comes from sales, where it names the person a seller has to reach, as distinct from the gatekeepers and the champions along the way. In creative work it carries the same meaning with one extra edge: the decision maker is also the person whose taste the work has to survive.
Decision makers come in types. Some are decisive and want a recommendation; some want the options and will choose; some want to feel the work was their idea. Reading which type is across the table changes how a presentation is built, and an agency that shows the same deck to all three will lose two of them.
Why it matters
Why a decision maker matters
Work that is approved by the wrong person gets unapproved by the right one. An agency that spends three months with a marketing manager, refining an idea round by round, and then shows it to the vice president for the first time at the end, discovers that the vice president has a different idea. Everything restarts. The cost is not just the time; it is the idea, which has usually been worn smooth by rounds of feedback from people who could not say yes.
Knowing the decision maker also changes how the work is made. Their priorities, whether that is sales this quarter, the board's perception, a rival's campaign or a personal conviction about the brand, are what the work has to answer. A brief that comes through three layers of people loses that information. A conversation with the decision maker gets it back.
In practice
How a decision maker works in practice
- 01
The first job is to identify them, which is harder than it sounds, because organizations are not honest about where authority sits. The question to ask is who can say yes without asking anyone else, and who can say no at the end regardless of what everyone else said. Often there are two: a budget holder and a taste holder. Then the agency arranges to meet them early, ideally at the brief and again at the first presentation of the idea, so that the direction is approved before the detail is built.
- 02
Through the project, the decision maker is kept close without being overwhelmed: informed of progress, consulted at the moments that matter, and never surprised. Their time is scarce, so the agency makes decisions easy to take, with a clear recommendation, the reasons for it and the alternatives considered. The day-to-day client contact, who is usually not the decision maker, becomes a partner in this, because they know how their boss thinks and when to bring things to them. The best client relationships are the ones where the agency and the day-to-day contact are working together to get the decision maker the right thing at the right moment.
Watch out
What people get wrong about decision makers
Mistaking the loudest person for the decision maker. Meetings are full of confident opinions from people who cannot approve anything, and an agency that redesigns the work for each of them ends up with something nobody wanted. Listen to everyone; build for the person who can say yes.
The other mistake is going around the day-to-day contact. Reaching the decision maker is not the same as bypassing the people who work for them, and an agency that does so loses the ally it needs most. The contact should be in the room, and ideally should be the one who arranged it.
