The Marketing Brief, like the Communication Brief, constitutes essential tools for teamwork: from the design of an offer to its communication to its targets.
A support that deserves your full attention both internally and in your relationship with agencies.
Your precision on the insight as well as the target is decisive.
The Marketing Brief like the Communication Brief are key tools for launching an offer or a product. A true “Carte Vitale” of your project, they ensure consistency step after step with the different audiences who contribute to the launch. Some companies only have one document that accompanies the entire project, others have specific documents for Marketing and Communication. This may depend on the size of the company, its internal organization but also its mode of relationship with agencies.
The Marketing Briefallows you to align different internal audiences who contribute to the design of your offer or product, from the upstream R&D team to the Communication team. This Brief may evolve during the project if the timeliness or technical feasibility of your solution changes. But, at each stage, it must clearly outline the reason for your project and the proposed solution.
The Communication Briefwill intervene rather at the end of the process, once the feasibility of your project has stabilized and your offer or your product is ready to be launched. It is primarily intended for your communications agency in order to provide it with key information enabling it to offer you impactful creative avenues for your communications media (print, films, banners, posters, etc.).
Whether it is the Marketing Brief or the Communication Brief, this document says a lot about the maturity of your thinking. The more precise it is on the targets, insights, benefits, advantages, characteristics and evidence, the more it reflects the outcome of your thinking, and therefore allows the teams working with you to better understand the contours of your project.
Obviously, the precision of your briefs in no way limits the ability of your interlocutors to share new suggestions with you. This flexibility is more due to your project management method than to the effort you have made to be precise in your brief. In other words, you can remain agile while being precise, or to put it another way, the “fuzzy” side of your brief is no guarantee of the openness or agility of your approach! Even within the framework of a Design Thinking approach involving different iterations, stay precise in each iteration. Your brief must allow any new participant on your project to understand your biases.
In Brief Marketing, insight is a key element because it determines the reason for your offer or product. Please note, this insight is not limited to a need (not every need awaits a new response). This insight must be as precise as possible, as the culmination of your understanding of the consumer issue. We recommend that you use the SMT method to write your insight, it is sufficiently precise to avoid misunderstandings or errors of interpretation which could delay your project. This marketing insight is not “creative”, it is insightful into a reality or a market trend. Creativity is the response you will provide to this insight with an inspiring value proposition.
Who says “insight” inevitably evokes the notion of target, this insight being the evocation of a consumer issue which is inevitably linked to one or more targets. So be both precise about your targets and their respective insights.
Your value proposition: the benefits, advantages, characteristics and proof of your offer therefore act as responses to these insights.
Note also the vigilance you must demonstrate to avoid writing “fantasized” insights a posteriori which would aim to artificially legitimize the reason for your offer. The insight must be true, in touch with reality and it must fit well with your value proposition.
Of course, the brief will include a lot of other information, particularly in its communication section (channels, media, budget, etc.). But keep in mind that targets and insight are the basic foundations on which the strength of your value proposition rests.
Particularly when it comes to the communication brief, its precision or imprecision will have a key impact on the reception of your offer by the market. A very precise brief demonstrates to the agency that your marketing thinking is successful. The more your biases are supported (sources of your market context data, etc.) the more impact you have when you discuss with your agency. The more concise your brief is, the more the agency will have to form its own “version” of your value proposition. The precision of your brief is at the center of a balance of power.
The fundamental question posed by this balance of power is the following: will the creative best serve the brand's product strategy?
The more vague the brief, the more the agency will have to fill the lack of information with its own data and its own inspiration (whether it concerns consumer needs, the target or product benefits). What guarantee will we then have on the real solidity of the value proposition? The risk is then to move away from the real areas of opportunity in the market, which would have been replaced by a vision essentially driven by creative advertising inspiration.
The more precise the brief, the more this creativity will be channeled. This does not necessarily mean that it will be restricted: once again it depends on the advertiser's ability to listen and the relevance of the creative ideas that will be provided. With a precise brief you have a clear message that communication will be able to make impactful with an inspired creative approach.
Some advertisers rely on their agencies to sometimes resolve questions that arise upstream of the project: consumer insights, targets, even the articulation of the value proposition. However, the agency often intervenes in the final phases of the project, when there is very little time left to form fundamental convictions, which require taking a step back. The agency then found itself forced to urgently resolve both marketing design questions and advertising creativity questions. This, within particularly tight deadlines, without being able to master the initial challenges of the launch.
The advertiser must therefore focus on clarifying targets and insights from the roadmap, during the marketing brief. This is the reason for its offering, from a market point of view. Of course, adjustments can be made during the project, but most of the necessary clearing up of these fundamental questions must be initiated upstream, so that at the time of the communication brief, the agency can have all the parameters allowing it to focus its creative efforts in the service of the company's and product's strategy.