The brief comes first. It provides the launchpad for your creative project and our approach to it. Good briefs deliver great outcomes and build successful client-agency relationships.

As a Chester-based marketing company, we work with diverse clients, but the thing that ensures we deliver the same high-quality work for all of them is clarity. Where does this clarity come from? It’s all in the brief.

The brief sets out the project’s scope clearly and what it aims to achieve. It defines a project’s purpose and objectives. You might think these elements are given, but even at this stage, things can start to go wrong. If, for instance, the client isn’t clear about what they want to achieve, then it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for the agency to deliver a clear outcome.

A lack of purpose and objectives leads to misunderstandings and mission creep because there’s no proper roadmap. Without a detailed brief, you can’t measure a project’s outcomes with any degree of precision.

The brief is fundamental to a project’s success. It might be possible to achieve an adequate outcome from a poor brief. But it’s much more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve something outstanding.

What Should Your Brief Include?

There are these basic components we ask for in a brief:

• Overview of the client company
• Direct and indirect competitors
• The target market
• The problem the project aims to solve
• The means of solving it
• The proposition
• Practical details, including budget and timescales.

The brief sets out what the client expects from the agency and how the agency plans to meet these expectations. However, challenges can arise when a project’s purpose is less sharply defined, for example, to raise brand awareness.

This is why creating the brief should be a collaborative process. The best kind of brief acts as a bridge between the client and the agency. It opens a dialogue and exchange of ideas.

Here’s an example.

We worked on an internal campaign for a large financial services company designed to improve the quality of its creative briefs. We played on the “briefs” idea by using underwear to communicate the message – packs of pants accompanying the company’s internal guide to creative brief writing.

This did the trick, gaining the necessary attention to improve the business’s brief-writing creative output significantly. But we needed that openness first to understand the issue, develop the concept and sell it to the client.

Defining Your Single-Minded Proposition

The single-minded proposition (SMP) is the thing that underpins the brief. It boils down to this:

What should we be asking the target market to do or think?

The marketing content must make the target market want to act – to buy, discover more, pick up the phone or click a button.

The SMP can be deceptively simple. Arriving at it takes time and effort because it’s the distilled essence of the marketing message. So, we don’t expect our clients to come with a fully-formed SMP when they first engage with us. It’s our task to do the critical thinking on your behalf.

Our tip: The SMP doesn’t need to be about your product being the best. It’s about finding an angle to explore and focus on that will make you stand out in the marketplace. This will vary, but it can incorporate elements such as customer service, how your product makes the customer feel or how it performs.

Don’t Jump the Gun

Naturally, as a client, you’ve got expectations. You might think you already know exactly what you want and how it should look. The temptation is to include this detail in your brief, such as pre-written straplines or completed concepts.

But the risk is that you’ll be boxing the agency in. You’re paying for our creativity, therefore it makes sense to extract maximum value from this relationship by letting us explore creative solutions freely.

Think of your chosen agency as a collaborator more than a service provider. If you’re giving them answers before they’ve asked you questions, you could be jumping the gun.

It’s Always Better to Ask

If the agency challenges the brief, they’re not being difficult or precious. We genuinely want to achieve the best outcome for you. If any part of the brief lacks clarity in its direction, we need to get this from you as early as possible.

Sometimes, this is just about clearing up a few points. But it might also point out fundamental flaws in the brief that neither the client nor the agency has spotted. In our view, it’s always better to ask.

Getting to Know You Better

The better the agency and client get to know each other, the smoother the process becomes. Collaborating on the brief is part of this process. Good briefs come from good relationships. They also help to strengthen them.

The vital thing to establish here is trust. The more open each party is with the other, the easier it will be to define the brief and work towards the desired outcome. The marketing project or campaign is the reason the client-agency relationship exists. The brief helps shape and guide it and gives it something against which to measure success.

The best creative work doesn’t come from complete freedom. It has a clear sense of direction. The brief provides this direction. It’s the responsibility of both the client and the agency to ensure the brief does its job.

We’re a marketing agency in Chester. Let us help you define your brief and deliver your marketing goals.