The Brief Makes No Sense. Now What?

First: don't solve anything

When a brief is confused, there is a temptation to demonstrate value by immediately making it better.

Someone spots an interesting audience angle. Someone else sees a campaign platform. A creative has an idea. Twenty minutes later the agency is energetically solving a problem nobody has actually agreed exists.

Stop.

Before you solve the brief, take it apart.

A messy brief normally contains lots of fundamentally different things pretending to be one thing: facts about the business, facts about the audience, business objectives, communication objectives, assumptions, mandatories, stakeholder opinions and sometimes potential solutions already smuggled into the brief.

Separate them.

Quite often you discover that the problem isn't missing information at all.

There is plenty of it. Nobody has decided which information actually matters.

Look for the contradictions

Contradictions in a brief aren't annoying details to smooth away. They are often the most useful thing in it.

A client may want to reach a new audience while protecting the positioning that works for the existing one. They may want to increase penetration while communicating three detailed product benefits. They may want to change how people see the brand without changing anything the brand does.

Individually, the objectives might all make sense. Together, they may not.

Show that logic back to the client.

We can do A. We can do B. But doing both has consequences. Which matters more?

Ideally, you get a priority.

Sometimes you won't. There might be three stakeholders and all three objectives survived precisely because nobody had the political appetite to kill one of them.

Fine.

At least you now know what the problem is.

If prioritisation isn't possible, try to reframe the challenge in a way that deals with the contradiction instead of quietly pretending it doesn't exist.

Get back to the business problem

"We need a new campaign" isn't a problem.

Neither is "we need to communicate our new product." And "we need to appeal to Gen Z" certainly isn't one.

Ask what needs to become different in the real world.

Are too few people considering the brand? Are existing buyers leaving? Has the category changed? Is the product misunderstood? Has a competitor made your old positioning less distinctive? Is the business trying to enter somewhere new?

Then ask what people actually need to do differently.

Buy us instead of them? Consider us when they currently don't? Use us more often? See us differently? Try something for the first time?

None of this magically produces a strategy.

But it makes it much harder to hide the absence of one behind words like awareness, engagement and relevance.

Work out what you actually need to know

Only now should you start identifying the gaps in the brief.

And don't respond by sending the client 27 questions.

Ask which missing answers could genuinely change the strategic direction. If knowing something wouldn't change what you recommend, you probably don't need to hold up the process to find it out.

This is also the point where a bad brief can become quite useful.

Because by taking it apart you have started doing the strategic work already. You know what is fact and what is assumption. You know where the contradictions are. You know what the business is actually trying to change and where you still need a decision.

Now rewrite the problem.

Then start solving it.

A bad brief isn't necessarily a bad starting point.

But only if you resist the urge to pretend it's a good one.