ASK YOUR WAY TO BETTER ANSWERS
The basics of every brief are simple – it’s just “What do we want to do?” with a side of “Why it matters”. But sorting the news from the noise can be harder than it looks.
What do you include? What do you skip over? How do you get to the guts of it without drowning in detail? It’s a challenge.
We reckon three simple questions are pretty much all you need.
What’s the point of this?
Why will anyone care?
What are the rules of the game?
Here’s how they play out through the three biggest Cs of any good brief, context, customer, and constraints.
Context: What’s the point of this?
Great work always solves business problems. So the clearer the problem, the better the work. Here’s how you dig for gold to get crystal clear on purpose.
What are we trying to achieve?
Why does it matter to the business?
What's the current situation - what do we want to change?
What do we know from what we've done in the past?
What’s the point of this?
Customer: Why will anyone care?
Great communication is a two-way street. If no-one hooks into your stuff, you’re just yelling in a cave and hoping for an echo. So getting to know the humans is essential.
What do we know about the people we're talking to?
What matters most in their world?
What do we want them to think, feel or do?
What reasons can we give them to believe us?
Why will anyone care?
Constraints: What are the rules?
Finally (but also firstly) are the hoops we need to jump through. The challenges, rules and guidelines are vital at the start because there’s nothing like the freedom of a tight brief.
How much time and money is there?
Any legal stuff to keep in mind?
Any tech limitations we need to know about?
Any brand guidelines we need to follow?
What are the rules?
And… Craft: How can we make it better?
With who, what and why in the bag, focus shifts to how. How do we cut-through and get noticed? How do we tell stories people remember?
How do we catch someone’s attention?
How do we make it easy to navigate and simple to understand?
How do we craft words and pictures to make people feel?
What can we cut? - because less is always more.
How can we make it better?
Three questions for better answers
With a rock solid brief, the craft is the easy bit. But brilliant creative always bounces best from a decent springboard. So ask yourself:
Do you have clear context? - Why does this even matter?
Did you think like a customer? - Why will anyone care?
Are you clear on constraints - What are the rules?
And from there, it’s just about passion and craft, noodling the detail, whittling down to essentials and always asking: How can we make this better?