The joy of tight briefs

Welcome back and good to see you yet again. I hope your time since we last spoke has been as fabulous as mine.

This week I want to talk to you about the joy of tight briefs. I am sure we all know how lovely tight briefs are and for those of us in the marketing profession it is even more important. It is Cicero’s humble opinion that the brief is the most important document a marketer is ever going to write and so good brief writing is a skill we must master to be successful marketers.

The brief is your instruction to your creative agencies. It encapsulates and crystallises your thinking, your insight and your business challenge to allow them to weave their creative magic. It also acts as your agreement with your agency and if their response bears little relationship to the brief you can ask them to start again. Without a brief in place, how are you going to judge the work when it comes back to you? And finally a good well written brief allows you as the marketer to ensure you have obtained the engagement of the business.

You would not spend millions of pounds on a new computer system or new premises without a detailed specification so why would you not do the same for your advertising or your communications? It is only your brand we are talking about.

Now hopefully you are starting to understand why tight briefs are so important. Indeed the better brief the better and more accurate the results. The GIGO principle of garbage in, garbage out also applies in marketing.

This is not the time and place to enter into a detailed master class into brief writing but instead Cicero will leave you as always with 4 key principles to aid enlightenment and understanding.

My first principle is that the brief should be in writing. Not only does this avoid any misunderstanding later but it also forces you as the client to consider deeply and thoroughly what you are asking for. The brief is not a form to be filled in at the last minute but a strategic document based on deep rigour and analysis. As someone far better than me once said:

‘Ultimately the point of communications is to get people to do things. Which people? What things? The basis of a great brief is right there. Everything else is detail’.

My second principle of a great brief should demonstrate great and focused clarity of thinking. The job of the brief is to simplify and tighten up thinking and the key to effective briefing is to provide a simple insight that will enthuse and inspire the creative team to dramatise memorably. This clarity should be a concentration of current thinking, should contain key nuggets of information and insight, and should focus on setting out the objectives of your product or service to be delivered through effective and memorable communications.

Thirdly make sure your objectives are crystal clear with a clear and focused understanding of how the creative and the communications programme will be measured and evaluated. The more concrete the measure, the tighter the brief, the better. Contrary to popular belief marketers want to help solve business problems and it is a great frustration for all involved in the process when there is no clear and credible problem to solve.

And finally a great brief is well brief. The clue is in the name. A good brief is not the longest or the most detailed. It’s the one whose clarity and focus creates the platform for a great strategic and creative leap, a blinding customer insight and an effective solution. Briefs are a summation and a crystallisation of your thinking. As Blaise Pascal put it in 1657

‘I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter’.

Clearly a man ahead of his time. But it is so true. Too much information and detail can fog and obscure the process. If you need more than 2 pages to produce a brief, you have missed the point.

And so there you have it. It’s official. Marketers prefer tight briefs to big briefs.

Is it only me?

Scarred by the accusation from one of my more forthright devotees that Cicero has been demonstrating and developing misogynistic tendencies and attitudes, I hope that careful note has been taken of my recent criticisms of the male gender. Cicero would also like to point out that he is above gender politics and point scoring.

But this week Cicero would like to ask what is it about men that means they seem reluctant to allow women to drive for them? Each morning as Cicero begins his daily schlep to his top secret State bunker, he sees cars and couples arriving at the station. Inevitably it is the male species driving and being dropped off and there is then the ritual of both getting out, swapping seats, bags and trolley dolly briefcases being collected, kisses and pecks exchanged and mirrors and seat positions being adjusted as the distaff driver takes over. I presume though am not sure that the reverse happens in the evening.

Is it only me but would it not make more sense and be more efficient for the distaff driver to do the driving to mitigate the need for all the exchange kerfuffle? It all seems very strange to me. Are men that loathe allowing themselves to be seen being driven by their driving distaff partner? Only wondering. Perhaps you might be able to explain this to me. Let me know.

And finally joy has this week broken out across government. Our lift is working and has remained in operation for a week now. I have it on good authority it has been out of order for 8 months. Tax receipts must be good this week.

Have a great week.

Sit felix. Et sit fortunatus.