You can download from the web a whole series of templates to help your organisation run more smoothly. Everything from a balance sheet to a training request form is available. Clearly, this is a wholly admirable attempt to bring the benefits of professionalism to smaller enterprises in particular.
One of the document templates available is a ‘campaign marketing brief’. The headings in the brief cover include amongst other things the campaign strategy, objectives, targets, tactics and resources.
Any encouragement for businesses to write a brief for their marketing ventures should be supported. And as any agency will tell you any brief is better than no brief at all, but it did seem to me that the template encouraged businesses to fall into the trap of so many briefs we look at, of telling you everything and informing you of nothing.
I’m not going to tell my grandmother to suck eggs, but I would like to make a small plea for marketing professionals to really examine the briefs they give their agencies, and for agencies to really examine the briefs they give their creatives.
First of all, it is worth remembering that a ‘brief’ according to Collins English dictionary is a ‘condensed or short statement, or written synopsis’. It is important to keep the brief short, and avoid telling the agency or creatives everything there is to know about the product, service or company from the beginning of time.
Of course, essential background should be included, but you do need to get the reader to pay attention to what is important, and not bemuse them with trivial detail. Keep it short.
Most marketing material we can produce is facing unprecedented competition for attention. Some 3000-4000 marketing messages of some sort assail us every day. So it is important that we understand that the origin of our message has to be succinct and to really focus on the one important thing we are trying to say.
It is particularly tempting with B2B products and services, to throw into the brief all the details, and myriad features that makes this complex product so much better than our competitors equally complex product. And it is so easy to miss the one thing that will make someone want this product or service. Keep it simple.
The downloaded brief I mentioned earlier included a section on ‘target market’. The only sub-heading it allowed was ‘target source’. There seemed to be no acknowledgement of how the target thinks and feels, how this particular company product or service solves its problems, or of how we would like them to think, feel or react as a result of our activity.
Curiously, it is even more important in a B2B context to treat the ‘target’ as a real human being and to write the brief from their point of view. In all marketing we know that we are talking to people who lead busy lives, but this is even truer of people at work. So we need to really examine what their desires, wants and motivations are both from a rational and an emotional point of view.
The one glaring omission from the ‘brief template’ was any mention of a proposition. And yet it is the hardest and probably most important aspect of any brief. Distilling what we have to offer into something that is of real benefit to someone else is the kernel of a good brief.
This is where we really get into the minds and hearts of our audience. Except that they are no longer a passive audience. The concept of a ‘target’, passively sitting there waiting for our ads has become obsolete.
The old idea that we are fixing our sights on a poor defenceless creature who will become the victim of our perfect message is out-of-date.
The new permission-based paradigm means that our passive ‘target’ is now an active ‘selector’. They will agree to receive our message if there is something in it for them, and if there isn’t they will screen it out of their consciousness along with the other 3999 messages that bored them today.
And this is why what we are proposing needs more than ever, to be compelling. Of course it needs to be told in an arresting way, but the brief itself has to include the germ of why someone with free choice should listen. So remember not only who it is you would like to talk to, but ask yourself why should they want to talk to you?
