To write a successful brief, you must choose one of two routes when starting out; ask or tell.
Is your brief asking an external expert their opinion on how to solve a challenge, or aid the evolution of something (regardless of how difficult or uncomfortable the advice may be)? Or, do you know exactly what you want? In which case you must be specific e.g. “please paint this wall green with outdoor, waterproof paint”.
The middle is the danger ground that we often see clients fall into. The impact from the danger is that budget is wasted, outputs are weak and results are mediocre.
The one factor that tends to push clients into the middle is perceived risk of failure (driven often by internal culture). The tendency is to ask for expert opinion (tell us how to do it, so we can’t be blamed for getting it wrong) but then constrain the expert with some specific deliverables to feel safe that you’re going to get something and keep bosses, or procurement, happy.
We saw this recently with a government tender. The brief stated that this new thing was like no other and required no holds barred innovation, building the future, forward thinking, only unconventional ideas accepted – but asked for the delivery a quarterly newsletter, one social media post per week and x-hours of media relations.
Hmmmm.
The way to succeed in our experience is to not ask AND tell.
With twenty years of brief writing under our belts, here’s how we do it.
- Do your research
- Accept that mistakes and errors will occur. Nothing in marketing and communications is totally unrecoverable – even PR faux pas.
- If asking for expert opinion, the brief should be no more than a few sentences, written in real-world language and be totally honest and transparent about the problem – “we’re seeing a decline in sales of XYZ service and need to invigorate sales, please could you provide a methodology on how to solve this that includes research/analysis, solution design and delivery….”
- Specifics should be limited to the technical specification of the outputs – “we require a colour 2D asset in 9:16 ratio, canvas size xxxx px and in *.png format”.
- Be completely honest about who you’re asking to answer the brief. Don’t invite Kwik-fit to tender on a brief that requires landscaping – unless you are sure that you can access the one tyre fitter who moonlights as a Chelsea garden designer and won an award last year – in which case, crack on. But do your research. Equally don’t just go to a big commercial agency – “nobody got fired for hiring IBM”, but no one made a name for themselves by doing so either.
Another fun tip … ask (and pay) three suppliers to develop some early concepts to solve your problem with a very top level brief and pick the route you favour or allow their outputs to influence your brief.
Give it a go! Or call us and we’ll help you get out of the starting blocks.
