Written briefs are handy tools, especially when the marketers and writers that use them already possess foundational insights about the brand, the industry, the context. If you’re clear on market positioning, brand orientation, audience journey and mindset, core values, differentiators, and ideal messaging, a brief *can* do the trick, while saving time.
But as standalone items, briefs stop short at “tricky.” Without a live conversation, a copywriter new to the brand cannot benefit from the rich side anecdotes, active examples, fleeting comments (crucial in hindsight), assumption clarifiers, and other humanized insights that reveal color and shading, light and curvature, silhouette and expression.
These things preface true understanding. As with most learning, reading a textbook is not enough: you need to think through the material, model it this way and that, roll it around like Play-doh, stretch and poke at it before the sun comes out — and a working knowledge emerges.
And once that happens, the magic becomes available. You can bypass jargon, skip rote recitations, omit all generic narrative. Instead of these crutches, you have a painter’s unlimited palette, full of pigments and textures, radiance and transparencies. It’s evocative. It’s vivid. It’s unpredictable. It’s human.
My copywriting team has learned much from our kickoff conversations:
We’ve learned about cell phones that got hurled in the heat of passion, which yielded a perfect, humanized tagline for a construction manufacturer.
We’ve understood that when they said X, they meant Y: a context entirely unique within the industry, and ultra-beneficial to customers.
We’ve learned about the superior skill set behind their uncanny ability to close nearly every client that knocks on their door. The skill set was both hard and necessary to describe; it was only through spoken Q&A that we were able to translate that elusive “it” factor into something punchy, informative, and real.
What’s your own practice around briefs?
—Are you in favor of the standalone brief? Or do you find it limiting, like we do?
—Does writing a brief ever feel like homework? Do yours tend to be succinct or lengthy?
—Have you ever worked hard on a brief, then learned the hard way how much still needed to be discussed?
Drop us a line at info@marketsmiths.com. We’d love to hear from you.
