The Brief Nobody Writes (and Why Everything Downstream Suffers)

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The costliest phrase in marketing is “I thought we agreed on that.”

You hear it in check-ins, in requests for changes, and when creative work returns to find management saying, “This isn’t what I pictured,” and the team replying, “This is precisely what you requested” – with each side being correct, as no one put in writing what the work was actually for.

I’ve encountered this so many times I’ve lost count. A project starts with enthusiasm and goodwill. The people involved are skilled. The completion date is pressing yet feasible. Then, between the first talk and the initial product, things go a little off. Not by much – but enough that when the work is looked at, it has to be done over. And doing work over is where funding, schedules, and spirits all collapse.

The underlying reason is rarely skill. Nor is it the equipment. It is understanding – or, to be exact, not having a project summary that does its job.

Photo by - Landsmann - on Unsplash

The project summary, which isn’t useful

Most marketing groups haveaf project summary. It could be a pattern in a program for handling projects. It could be a document everyone shares, containing spaces for “goal”, “people we’re aiming at”, “main idea”, and “things to deliver”. It looks like everyone is on the same page, when in truth it is usually a form people fill in because the system asks for it, and not so that anyone will use it to decide things.

The trouble with most project summaries is that they answer the wrong questions. They say what is being produced – “a social media push”, “a web page for first visits”, “a single page about the product” – without saying why it is being produced, and how we’ll know if it was successful.

A project summary that states, “make a social media push for the product release in the third quarter of the year, aimed at our usual customers,” is not a project summary. It is a job order. It tells you what to make, but nothing about what to put first, what to give up, or what winning would be.

What a really good brief does

It starts a discussion that most groups don’t have – not because of a lack of interest, but because it’s difficult. It demands exactness. It demands saying “this, and not that.” It requires someone in the room to agree on what success would be before any work is done, and so to accept being judged by that later.

Here’s what, to me, a good brief responds to:

• What does the business need from this? Not what marketing wants to create, but what the business genuinely needs to be achieved. Is this to make a demand? To help a sales process? To keep customers? To build recognition in a new group? The answer influences everything that comes after, and if it’s not clear, the work will be the same.

• Who, exactly, is this for? “Our target audience” isn’t enough. A good brief states the person, the job, the situation, and the issue they’re trying to resolve. A brief for a product launch aimed at current customers will be very different from one for potential customers who’ve never heard of you. If the brief doesn’t tell the difference between those, the campaign won’t either.

• What is the one thing we want them to know or do? Just the one thing. Not three main points. Not a list of qualities. If you can’t reduce the campaign to a single idea or action, the people you’re reaching won’t do it for you. This is the hardest part of the brief to write, which is precisely why it’s the most important.

• What will success be, and how will we measure it? Before any piece is designed or any word is written, all those involved ought to be able to answer: “How will we know this worked?” If the answer is “interaction” or “recognition,” press further. Those aren’t results – they’re types. What kind of interaction? Measured how? In relation to what?

• What limits are we working within? Money, time, rules to follow, brand rules, channel limits. Limits aren’t blocks to imagination; they are the lines that make imagination useful. In areas with a lot of regulation, in particular, knowing your limits at the start stops the painful process of building something ambitious, sending it to lawyers, and seeing it reduced.

Where briefs actually go wrong

The brief itself is never the actual issue. The actual issue is the discussion the brief is meant to start. If that discussion is skipped – because the deadline is close, because leaders don’t want to decide, because “we’ll work it out as we go” – the brief becomes decoration.

I’ve worked on projects where the brief was perfect, and the result was a mess, because the people who needed to agree never really read it. And I’ve worked on projects where there wasn’t a formal brief at all, but the group had a 20-minute discussion that answered the five questions above, and the work was right the first time.

The form doesn’t matter. The agreement does.

The cost later on

When clarity is missing at the start, every stage after that takes the cost. Creative work goes the wrong way. Changes grow. People with a stake give opposing feedback because they never agreed on what the work was to achieve. The group gets let down – not because the work is hard, but because it keeps changing for reasons that seem random.

And here’s the part that is rarely counted: the cost of what’s lost. Every hour spent redoing a campaign that wasn’t briefed well is an hour that could have gone to the next task. Multiply that over a quarter, and you start to see why some groups always feel behind. It’s not because they’re slow. It’s because they’re doing the same work twice.

The solution is simple (but not easy)

Write the brief. Have the discussion. Be exact about what the business needs, who it’s for, what the one most important message is, how you’ll measure success, and what limits can’t be changed.

If the people in the room can’t agree on those five things, that’s not a problem with the brief – that’s a strategy problem. And it’s better to find that out before you’ve used up two weeks of work time than after.

Clarity isn’t the most exciting part of marketing. But it’s the part that decides whether everything else builds up or falls apart.