Insights
How to Write a Brief
Producing output has never been cheaper. Which makes the brief the only thing left that separates good work from expensive noise
There was a time when the expensive part of marketing was making things. Producing the film, buying the media, printing the collateral, building the site. Because production was expensive, it absorbed the attention.
That cost has collapsed. Which means the quality of the instruction now determines the quality of the output almost entirely – and the instruction is the brief.
A weak brief describes what you want made. A strong one defines the problem precisely enough that the answer becomes findable.
What a brief is for
Three jobs, and most briefs only do the first.
- To transfer understanding. Everything the person doing the work needs to know and could not reasonably guess.
- To constrain usefully. A brief without boundaries produces work that cannot be judged. Constraints are the most generous thing you can give a creative team.
- To create a shared standard of success. So that “I don’t like it” becomes “this does not do what we agreed it must do”.
The anatomy
The sections below appear, in some form, in every credible briefing standard. The wording varies; the content does not.
| Section | What it must actually contain |
|---|---|
| Administration | Client, project, date, job number, budget, and who wrote the brief. Unglamorous and it prevents half of all disputes. |
| Background | How this came about. A local decision, a research finding, a competitive move, a new initiative. Context the reader could not infer. |
| Objective | What this must achieve. The critical success factors. What success looks like, and how you will know it has been reached. |
| Audience | A person, not a demographic bracket. What they currently think, what they do, what would change their mind. |
| Single-minded message | One idea. Not five. If you cannot reduce it to one, the thinking is not finished. |
| Competitive position | Who else is saying something similar, and why anyone should believe you instead. |
| Tone and perception | How it should feel, and how it must not feel. Adjectives are acceptable here and nowhere else. |
| Deliverables | Exactly what is required, in what quantity, by when. Specific enough to price. |
| Mandatories | Legal requirements, brand guidelines, approval process, anything that cannot change. |
| Measurement | Qualitative and quantitative. Agreed before the work starts, not after it disappoints. |
The positioning statement
One formula, worth memorising. If you cannot complete it, no agency can rescue the work.
It is for [audience] who [need or problem]. The [product] is a [category] that [key benefit]. Unlike [alternative], we [differentiator].
Six blanks. Each one is a decision, and each one is a place where vagueness hides.
- “Everyone” in the first blank means you have not segmented.
- A vague need in the second means you are guessing at the problem.
- The wrong category in the third means you are competing in a set the customer does not recognise.
- A feature in the fourth means you have not translated to benefit.
- No named alternative in the fifth means you have not accepted that the customer has choices.
- And a differentiator a competitor could also claim means you have not differentiated at all.
The audience section is where most briefs fail
Compare two versions of the same instruction.
The weak version
“Marketing decision-makers in mid-sized businesses, aged 35 to 55, in metropolitan areas.”
This describes a filing category. It tells the writer nothing about what to say.
The strong version
One real brief described its audience as a marketing vice-president at a high-profile studio: twenty years in the industry, considered old school, came up through production rather than digital. Interested in technology but uses a computer mainly for email and calendar. On a shared office connection, running whatever browser came with the machine. Rarely online, and almost never outside work. Looks at competitors’ marketing when he does.
That paragraph tells you the site must load on a slow connection, work in an old browser, be navigable without patience, and demonstrate credibility through work rather than through interface cleverness. Every one of those is a design decision, and all of them came from describing a person instead of a bracket.
Briefing a brand, not just a campaign
A branding brief carries three additional sections that a creative brief does not.
- Current versus desired positioning. Where the brand stands today and where it must stand. Both stated, so the distance is visible.
- Current versus desired brand image. Positioning is what you claim. Image is what they believe. They are rarely the same, and the gap is the brief.
- The elevator pitch. The positioning statement above, completed. Be explicit about what problem you solve, why it is a problem, and who has it.
Six failures worth recognising
- The brief that is a wish list. Five objectives, all primary. Nothing can be optimised for five things.
- The brief written after the solution. Someone already knows what they want made. The brief is reverse-engineered to justify it, and the work is judged against an unstated preference.
- The brief with no budget. Withholding it does not get you a better price. It gets you work priced for a different problem.
- The brief with no named decision-maker. Work returns, is approved by three people, then rejected by a fourth who was never in the process.
- The brief that describes the execution. If you have specified the format, the length and the treatment, you have not briefed. You have ordered.
- The verbal brief. Nothing to return to, nothing to judge against, and two different recollections of the same conversation.
Why this is now a leadership skill
When execution was expensive, briefing quality mattered but was partially forgiven – the cost of production forced a degree of rigour before anyone started.
That forcing function is gone. Work can now begin instantly, cheaply, and at volume. Which means a vague brief no longer produces delay. It produces a large quantity of confidently wrong output, quickly, at a good standard of finish.
The brief is the last remaining point at which judgement enters the process. That makes writing one a senior skill, not an administrative one.