Good grief! Not a bad brief!

5 golden rules for a good brief

Brief writing is not easy.

“Can you make it pop?”

“We want to increase awareness and improve sales”.

“We don’t have a budget, but we need it to be impactful - but also lean”.

The brief could be for a creative campaign, a media recommendation, a shopper promotion or PR idea – the fact remains the same:

The better the brief, the better the outcome, the less time is wasted.

Here are the FIVE golden rules for briefing – mostly for our services, but the principles are universal when you’ve got on your marketing boots.

RULE #1 – Give a clear (& honest) objective

What do you really want?

“Improving sales” is a classic one with shopper marketing – and we will take that and run with it. But are there more specific ways of expressing this that will inform the recommendation and get more out of it?

In other words, how do you want to be improving sales? What is your volume source? What other products or competitors are your target audience considering? IMI Promotrack 2025 tells us that ‘in almost every category, more than 50% of volume uplift during a promotional campaign will come from people who rarely or never shop the brand’. Go beyond the key number we want to increase and delve into the who, where, and how, to get the solution most likely to succeed.

And sometimes it isn’t about traditional KPIs, the BAU or the ROI, BTW. It’s important to give the honest objective, even if it’s unusual. Maybe there’s a new boss that needs impressing, a key account that you’re romancing or perhaps it’s about occupying space to make room for incoming NPD. It can be anything – but, whatever it is, an honest objective will prevent getting responses that answer the ‘objective’ that looked good, but wasn’t driving the brief.

It all starts with the objective, so spend time on it and make it specific.

RULE #2 – Set the budget & timeline

Imagine you’re planning ‘a delicious dinner’ for a loved one. What would you choose?

Are you picturing it? Mmmm, sounds delicious.

Now, how would it change if you’ve $50 and shopping at the supermarket? Does it change if you’ve got $200? And what if you’re planning this occasion for 2 weeks’ time – versus grabbing something for after work today? Each idea could still be ‘a delicious dinner’, but budget and timeline change the outcome a lot.

Budget and timeline are the most dramatic parameters for any brief. They dictate the scale, resource, and urgency of your job – which gives you the best outcome AND helps your agency manage their workflow. Very kind, thank you!

Some marketers worry that giving the budget to an agency means they’ll find a way to spend it all – even if it’s not necessary for achieving the objective. To manage this issue, you have two options:

(1) LIE! Give them a smaller budget with some extra ringfenced away or             

(2) Have a healthy and open conversation about the budget and your objectives.

As far as achieving best outcomes go, either can get you there.

On top of these, set any other key parameters based on the objective. How many stores? What regions? What channels? Let your brief determine the suitable resource for your agency.

RULE #3 – Work backwards; set the deliverables you need

This one can be a little ‘chicken vs egg’.

Like the last Rule, the nature, number, and size of the deliverables are instrumental parameters that will instruct the resource that goes into the response. However, there are a lot of occasions where the deliverables are contingent on the budget and timeline themselves.

For example, “how many pieces of point-of-sale do you need” may swiftly be answered with, “how many can I afford with this budget?”

That said, a ‘perfect world’ or estimated set of deliverables will short-track the recommendation to keep it within scope – and test your agency to stay within bounds of the project. Asking for 4x 15-second pieces of video content in 6:19 within a $10k budget will task an agency to seek efficiencies to achieve that goal – whereas just asking for ‘video content’ may result in 1 or 2 longer pieces and fall short of what is needed.

This can also work with briefing a specific KPI or performance metric and asking for a recommendation for deliverables. For media, this might be reaching a number of people twice in a 4-week period. For a sampling campaign, it may be a number of trials or converted purchases. Either way, the agency is more likely to accurately scope the project to best fit needs and resource by knowing what to deliver to make everyone happy.

RULE #4 – Align internally before the brief

This rule is about making sure key stakeholders are on board with what you’re asking and identifying key mandatories before the brief leaves the station.

There’s often (almost always) time pressure to get things going as fast as possible – which means getting the brief off your desk feels like the agency will have longer to formulate a great response.

This can be true, but sometimes it leads to key resources or mandatories being left off the recipe for a recommendation that matters. An agency might come up with a great idea to achieve your objective, but if it differs to the boss’ priorities or lacks something that sales or legal require. Then the time saved becomes time wasted and pressure starts to mount.

Getting a peer or key stakeholder to review the brief works wonders for ensuring all ducks are in a row and the first response has its best chance of success. This also allows space to get the correct design files or brand guidelines ready, articulate the most suitable KPIs, and establish a timeline that fits cross-functionally.

An extra day or two is great, but we’d rather lose it at the start of project than try to find it at the end.

RULE #5 – Use specific language to inform creative

The best is saved till last.

We are blessed with an endless bounty of verbs, nouns, and adjectives to communicate with each other, so don’t be shy. The best language for briefing is specific language; words that carry meaning that is as objective as possible. So, this means, where possible, avoiding words that are famously subjective.

A good starting point is abolishing all words that mean good or bad. This means that the following go out the door: Cool, impressive, premium, creative, disruptive, and eye-catching.  

We could argue about these examples, but that’s kind-of the point.

We’re lucky to work in the world of marketing; characterised by expression, semiotics, and vast swaths of iconography to deliver a message. So why not have fun and shake off the shackles of corporate terminology? Link with examples as inspiration if you like – or use visuals or mood boards. Colour outside the lines of your briefing template; you’re free to use anything to help your idea be more clear.

For example, ‘cool’ could be ‘on-trend, contemporary colour combinations that wouldn’t be out of place on a TikToker’s t-shirt’. ‘Premium’ could be ‘influenced by luxury handbag aesthetics and materials – with chic elegance and balanced tones’. Being expressive and specific will leave less up to chance and arm creatives with the tools (and inspiration) to bring your vision to life.

This final rule goes hand-in-hand with Rule #4 and managing stakeholders. It’s likely that your team will have different ideas of what is cool or premium, so set the scene from the start to get everyone on the same page. This will make it much easier when it comes time to feed back on the recommendation and set your project in the right direction.

There is a lot more to consider with briefing – we haven’t even touched on length, presentation, process, and so on. But refining your approach and considering these five rules will get better outcomes, shorter timelines, better relationships across project teams, and less strain on budgets.