Are you preparing something new at your company? You know you need something striking for your audience. But how do you put it into words so you can move from the starting point?
A campaign for a new product launch, a refreshed website, a new and clearer brand story, marketing support for sales, or stronger visibility. These are all real, legitimate, often essential goals on the path to greater business success. The instinct is right, the timing is right, the energy is right.
Then comes the moment to put your need into words, and that’s where it stalls. How do you write a good brief?
‘We need something new.’
‘The competition is doing more than we are.’
‘It seems like our audience doesn’t get our strengths.’
These aren’t wrong observations, but they are vague. And that’s exactly where the problem starts. We come across it and tackle it at Pakt very often. Companies know they need something, but they don’t know how to translate that into a good brief. Why is that even a problem? Because without a good starting point, even the best agency or in-house marketing team can’t perform miracles. And because a poor brief almost always means more rounds of revisions, more frustration, more cost, and a weaker final result.
A brief isn’t a document, it’s a conversation.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that a brief is a formality. Something you have to ‘hand off’ so the project can begin. But a sentence along the lines of ‘you’re the marketing people, you know how to tell the audience we have something great’ is, as a rule, a recipe for a headache.
In reality, a brief is a condensed form of a company’s thinking about what it wants to achieve, why, and in what context. Companies often start from potential (and not necessarily the right) solutions rather than the challenge itself. They want a video, an ad, a new website or a campaign before they have answered the question of what is genuinely not working and what needs to be said differently. Is the issue that the market doesn’t know you? That it misunderstands you? That sales isn’t getting enough support? That you have too many different messages going out? Or that the business focus has shifted, while the communication hasn’t?
A good brief starts with the question ‘what’s going on,’ not with ‘what would we like to have?’
An average brief is almost always missing three things: context, focus, and measures of success. Without these three, success can only be assessed once it’s all over, and often not against the right criteria.
Context means your marketing partner understands what stage you are in. Is the company growing, plateauing, restructuring? What are the pressures inside the organisation? What has already been tried, and why didn’t it work? Without that, ideas are evaluated in a vacuum.
Focus means that not everything is equally important. If the priority is ‘everything’, then nothing is a priority. Companies often list ten goals instead of choosing one or two essential ones. The result is scattered solutions that don’t truly speak to anyone.
Measures of success are then often limited to likes, impressions, or a general feeling.
Too rarely is it spelled out in advance what ‘success’ will actually mean for the company. So what is the key success criterion, the famous KPI (key performance indicator)? Is it more inquiries? A better understanding of your offer? A faster sales process? A stronger financial return?
Why does a poor brief cost more than a good one?
A poor brief doesn’t doom a project to failure. But it does mean the process will likely be more expensive, slower and more exhausting. Marketing will be guessing, the company will be asking for changes, and both sides will feel like they aren’t quite on the same page. Frustration is very likely, and so is friction.
A good brief, by contrast, works as an accelerator. It allows energy to be channelled into finding the right solution rather than explaining the basics. It shortens decision-making. It cuts down on the number of revisions. Most of all, it ensures the final result genuinely serves business goals, not just an ‘artistic impression’.
You don’t need to know everything. That’s why we exist.
Here we get to an important point. A good brief doesn’t mean a company has to have all the answers itself. Quite the opposite. The team inside a company usually can’t be an expert in strategy, communication and execution all at once. Your people are specialists in what they do, and they do it well. Part of doing that well is knowing how to find the right partner.
At Pakt, our collaborations begin daily right at the brief-writing stage. We help you ask the right questions, distil the essence, define the focus, and translate gut feelings into clear goals. A brief can be the result of collaboration, not a one-way order.
If you know you need something but can’t quite put it into words, you are already on the right track. The next step isn’t to puzzle over it on your own. It’s to talk it through with us.
A good brief isn’t a sign that you have all the answers. It’s a sign that you are ready to look for the right ones.
Let’s talk.
