Thinking
Notes on brand and marketing, written from the work rather than about it.
The Best Brief Can’t Fix an Unfinished Foundation
An agency brief looks like a marketing document. Read one closely, and it's something else: a record of the decisions a leadership team has made, and a map of the ones it hasn't.
A strong brief doesn't answer its core questions as a list of facts. It answers them through the brand: its identity, its mission, vision and values, the pillars it stands on, and the narrative that ties them together.
That's where the quality of leadership decisions gets exposed. You can fill in a form with anything. You can't tell a coherent brand story about decisions you haven't made.
Your customer data isn't objective. You helped create it.
The customer list you're using to plan next year was assembled by the campaigns you ran last year.
Written down like that it sounds obvious. It stops being obvious the moment somebody in a meeting says let's build a lookalike audience off our best customers, and everyone nods, because who would argue with that.
Here's the loop underneath it.
AI can simulate your customer. It can't be one.
The persona in your research has never used your product.
It has read every review ever written about it. It has never opened the package, never been let down by it, never stood in an aisle deciding whether to buy it again.
For a while I didn't think that mattered much.