When you’re in the middle of a problem and being heavily influenced by internal politics, it’s easy to adopt an abject iteration of an existing plan, a subjective observation, or simply do what you believe will be signed off as the brief and not what is the full truth of both the problem and solution.
Truth and long-term sustainable success are intrinsically linked, so successful brief writing is dependent on having the persistence to peel back all the elements of market dynamics, customer demands, KPIs and being open to the true problem and then the solution regardless of the form that may take.
It’s always difficult telling a client the brief is wrong. As one once said, “agencies are arrogant to come in here and think that you know our business better than us”. Well, they don’t. But agencies, and specifically us, have a fresh perspective and neutral observation of customer behaviour and market trends. To ensure we’re getting the project right and spending the client’s money wisely, we always work with clients to achieve the right brief. We also work on multiple client projects from multiple sectors and (whilst they can be similar) the solution is always different.
A working example of this is a famous motor car company facing zero orders of new cars at wholesale for a particular model in the range. We were briefed to create an advertising campaign to boost popularity. Market conditions and macro-economic data however gave us a gut feel that something within the brief wasn’t right. So, we went to talk to some dealers and found that the troubled model was selling like hotcakes, in fact it was the best-selling model in the range, but at retail. High quality used stock was seeing customers hot swapping their cars like Quality Street trade-in-drive-away deals. Dealers were able to offer cars instantly – on the lot ready to go – with only a few thousand miles, significantly cheaper than a new model and without the 6-month wait for a new one. An advertising campaign as briefed would only have amplified this behaviour, not solved the problem of generating more orders at wholesale. We therefore wrote a different brief and devised a deal with sales teams (originally deemed impossible) to pack new cars with new and innovate features as standard within the base price, not available on previous stock. This solved the problem of restocking orders at wholesale.
Persistence, thorough investigation and an openness to the truth that ultimately provide the winning factors.
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