Part III
What strategists owe creative people in a brief
Once the client's input has been interrogated, the strategist owes the creative team a useful handover. If I could keep only three things from that handover, I would keep a deep understanding of what the audience actually cares about, the problem the work needs to solve and the boundaries of the brand.
Those three things give a creative team someone to understand, something to change and a reason this brand should be the one doing it. Much of the rest can be useful. Without these, the brief is usually paperwork.
Begin with what people care about
An audience description helps creatives when it explains a motivation, tension or behaviour they can recognise. Demographics, segment names and media labels rarely do this on their own.
What matters about the category? What do people find frustrating, exciting or risky? What are they trying to protect about themselves? Which compromise have they accepted as normal? A good brief selects the part of the audience understanding that matters for this assignment rather than pasting in everything known about them.
The selection is important. A creative team should not need to search a ten-page persona for the one sentence that changes the work.
Give them a precise problem and a standard for success
The problem should describe the change communication can make. “Sales are down” may be the business problem, but creative work needs to know what is happening in people's heads or behaviour that contributes to it.
Perhaps the brand is not considered. Perhaps it is familiar but seen as irrelevant. Perhaps people value the benefit and do not believe this brand can deliver it. Each diagnosis suggests a different creative problem.
A brief that skips this step often replaces the problem with an objective: increase awareness, drive trial, make the brand famous. That tells the team what success looks like at a high level. It does not yet explain what stands in the way.
The team also needs to understand the intended change well enough to judge ideas. What should become more noticeable, believable or easy to act on? This is not a demand to plaster the brief with KPIs. It is a shared standard for deciding whether an idea solves the problem or merely looks good in the room.
Brand boundaries create productive limits
Creativity benefits from limits when those limits have a reason. The brief should explain what the brand can credibly say, which position it is working from and what would feel wrong even if it attracted attention.
This is more useful than a long list of tone adjectives. “Bold, warm, human and optimistic” can describe nearly anything after the fact. A boundary should help someone reject an idea before production. It might concern the promise, the role the brand plays or the kind of relationship it wants with the audience.
Direction leaves room for solutions
A good brief gives direction rather than a finished solution. That balance is where much of the craft lies.
Too much specificity can reduce the creative task to execution. The proposition is written as a headline, the visual metaphor is suggested and the channels are filled with examples. The team may produce a polished version, but it had little room to discover a better answer.
Vagueness creates the opposite problem. “Make the brand culturally relevant” appears generous until the team realises that every possible idea could claim to do it. Freedom without a decision simply moves strategy into the creative department.
The logo test
The clearest sign that strategy has not made a decision is when creatives can return with almost anything and it remains “on strategy” as long as the correct logo and colours are applied.
A brief needs enough definition to distinguish a relevant idea from a merely enjoyable one. This should not turn the brief into a compliance checklist. It means the team can explain why an idea solves this problem for this audience in a way that makes sense for this brand.
A brief is a working agreement
The best briefs are discussed. Account management brings the client and commercial context. Strategy brings the diagnosis and choices. Creative people test whether the direction contains creative potential. The document records the agreement well enough for the work to proceed.
It can change when the work reveals something important. If it does, the change should be conscious. Quietly redefining the problem to fit the first promising idea makes the strategy impossible to learn from later.
A good creative brief is what strategists owe creative people: something human to work with, a problem precise enough to solve, brand boundaries, a single-minded direction, a standard for success and room to surprise everyone.