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.
The questions are always the same:
Who is the customer we're trying to reach, and what do we know about them that others don't?
What problem are we actually solving?
Who are we as a brand, and what do we stand for?
What story are we telling, and what role do we play in it?
What makes us meaningfully different?
What are we prioritizing, and what are we willing to leave out?
What do we want people to think, feel, or do differently?
And what does success actually look like?
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.
I've worked on both sides of the brief. On the agency side, I've turned a multi-state bank acquisition into a marketing plan across more than 20 markets, and taken brands from concept to launch. On the client side, I’ve been responsible for giving our agency partners what they needed to do great work. From either side, the brief tells me a lot about the organization behind it before any work gets made.
Brand foundations are leadership decisions
Mission, vision, values, pillars and narrative often get treated as marketing deliverables. A workshop, a slide, a paragraph on the About page. They're something bigger: the decisions that give direction to everything a company does. Who it hires, which deals it chases, what it builds, which partners it says yes to, and what it says when someone asks what it does.
Each one is a choice, and each choice leaves something out.
Mission decides why you exist and what you do, which means deciding what you don't.
Vision decides where you're going, which means deciding where you won't.
Values decide how you behave when it costs something. A value that never costs anything is decoration.
Pillars decide the few things you'll stand on every time, which means leaving out plenty of things that are also true.
Narrative decides the story: who the hero is, what they're up against, and what role you play in helping them.
When those decisions have been made, the brief nearly writes itself. When they haven't, the brief is where it shows. It's often the first time someone outside the company tries to use the brand foundation to make something.
What a record looks like
Last year I worked with Belonging, a company started by Ann Cook after years of co-parenting her two boys across two homes. Its product, the Life Locker, helps kids in multi-home families carry what matters to them between houses.
The brief we built wasn't short. But it made choices everywhere you looked.
It ranked the audience instead of listing it: parents in multi-home families first, grandparents second, and professionals like therapists and school counselors third.
It named what people believed and what we wanted them to believe. Parents told themselves "packing is just part of the deal" and "kids don't need this." We wanted them to believe "my child deserves stability in both homes."
It defined a personality: empathetic, empowering, practical but elevated.
And it made the hardest call, which was deciding what the product was not. It's not a bag. It's peace of mind.
That decision shaped everything that followed. When we filmed parents, kids, grandparents and therapists, the brief told us what we were listening for. A therapist talked about a child getting to know "who I am in both places." A grandmother talked about her granddaughter finally having a place for her stuffed cat. And Ann said it better than any tagline could: "The Life Locker is not about what you put in it. It's about what the kids get out of it."
I knew one of the tensions in that brief firsthand. My daughter uses a Life Locker, and before she did, I wasn't sure she needed one. She had everything she needed at both houses. Then she saw it and started packing. The belief the brief set out to change was one I had held myself.
Every video, every page of the website and every piece of content traced back to decisions made in that brief. When the work came back, there was something to judge it against. That's what a record looks like.
What a map looks like
More recently I started working with a company that had the opposite problem, and it's one more good companies have than will admit it. They couldn't clearly answer the most basic question anyone would ask them: what do you do?
The timing mattered. They were about to walk into an event full of potential customers, people they would get one conversation to make an impression on.
It wasn't for lack of trying. The CEO told me they had worked with a lot of people to figure it out, and nobody had gotten there. In a matter of hours, we did.
The answer wasn't hidden. The problem was that they knew too much. They did a lot of things well, every one of them was true, and every attempt to describe the company tried to include all of it. What they needed wasn't more language. They needed help choosing, and a foundation to hold the choice: a clear mission, the values behind it, the pillars they would stand on, and a narrative with their customer at the center.
That foundation isn't a tagline. It's what everything else gets built from.
Creative gets a standard it can be judged against.
Messaging stops being reinvented for every audience and starts being adapted from one story.
Personal interactions line up. Everyone on the team can answer "what do you do?" the same way, at an event, on a call or over dinner.
Training has a spine: what we believe and how we behave.
New hires onboard into a story instead of piecing one together from ten different conversations.
Business pitches start from the same place and get tailored, not rebuilt from scratch.
Website copy stops trying to say everything and starts saying the right thing first.
None of that is marketing's job alone. It's what becomes possible when leadership makes the decisions a brand foundation requires. An outside perspective can get a company there faster. The decisions, and the commitment to stand behind them, still belong to the people running it.
How to read the map on the page
When the foundation hasn't been decided, the brief shows it.
When the mission hasn't chosen, the target becomes everyone. Young professionals and families and retirees. Adults 25 to 64. Every "and" in a place where a choice belongs marks a conversation that didn't finish.
When the values are decoration, the brand gets described in words every competitor could use. Innovative, authentic, quality, trusted.
When the pillars haven't been set, the message has to carry six different benefits, and the objective becomes awareness, consideration, conversion, retention and loyalty.
When nobody owns the narrative, every stakeholder gets a sentence, and you can often tell whose sentence is whose.
Nothing in a brief like that is technically wrong. And nothing is particularly clear. It's a peace treaty. Everyone signs it because everyone can find their own answer in it, and it keeps the peace at kickoff. But the decisions that weren't made don't go away. They show up later, in the creative review, when the work can't be judged against anything because the brief never said what it was supposed to do.
Values get tested in rooms, not on posters
Disagreement isn't the problem. Ask five executives who their most important customer is and you might get five different answers, and those differences are useful. What matters is whether leadership resolves them.
In destination marketing, this happens at every table. A stakeholder session at Visit Central Oregon might include the general manager of a resort, the president of a museum, a small business owner and a county commissioner, and that's four people out of a dozen. One is focused on revenue. One wants a voice for small businesses. One has constituents to answer to. Every one of those concerns is legitimate.
In one session, the conversation turned to who we wanted to feel welcome when they visited, and how we could do that collectively as a region. The room didn't agree. That was a values question, and no agency could have answered it. It belonged to the people at that table, and whatever they decided, or didn't, would show up in every brief that followed.
A narrative has to choose its hero
I learned the narrative lesson on the client side, from a brief I wrote.
I pushed back on our agencies a lot, usually not on ideas but on fit. On one golf campaign, the gap never closed. The work didn't connect with golfers, and part of the reason was simple: nobody on the agency team played golf. We moved the campaign to an agency whose owner had spent years working with Nike Golf.
They showed me the real problem was my brief.
Our story had one golfer as its hero. Central Oregon has three top 100 courses, multiple world-class rivers, and plenty for families to do, so we told people they could bring the family, play a top 100 course, and fly fish, all in the same day. All of it was true. It was also everything the region offered, packed into one person.
The new agency came back with research and three very different heroes. The bucket-list player comes for the top 100 courses and only those. He'll play all three in one trip, eat at the best restaurants, and finish the night with good whiskey and a cigar. When he wants to fish, he books a $20,000 week on a river in Russia. The buddy trip is a social trip: a group plays together, then heads to a brewery tour or a long group dinner, often on a three-day weekend or in the shoulder season if they're price conscious. And for families on vacation, golf is one activity among many.
The agency brought the insight, but the decisions were still ours. We built separate stories for the bucket-list players and the buddy trips. We took the family golfer out of the golf campaign entirely and moved golf into our family messaging as one more thing to do while you're here. Each campaign finally had one hero and one job.
Cutting the family golfer meant cutting my own idea. That's usually what a real choice feels like. I could have hired an agency to make my version work, and plenty of clients do. What I needed was an agency willing to tell me my story had the wrong hero, and I needed to be willing to hear it.
Authorship isn't ownership
Who writes the brief? Sometimes the company writes it and hands it over. Often the agency writes it from conversations with the client, which is how I work: questions, follow-ups, a draft, and a send-back to make sure it feels right. Either way, the agency can write every word, but it can't make the choices. When a brief comes back for approval, leadership isn't proofreading a document. It's signing off on decisions, or on the absence of them.
Most organizations think they have this handled. In a global study by BetterBriefs and Mark Ritson, 80% of marketers said they write excellent briefs. Only 10% of agencies agreed. In my experience, that gap usually isn't about writing. It's about what was decided before anyone started writing.
The best agency relationships I've experienced weren't the ones without disagreement. They were the ones where both sides were willing to be wrong.
Before your next brief
Ask "what do we do?" Have five people on your leadership team answer it on their own, in one sentence. If you get five different answers, your brief will have five answers too. Where the answers match, you have a foundation. Where they don't, you have your agenda.
Test your values against a real decision. Take the hardest call your company made last quarter. Did any of your values help decide it? If not, they're decoration, and your agency will end up writing decoration.
Rank your audiences. First, second, third. If everyone is first, no one is.
Decide what you are not. For every pillar and priority, write down what you're choosing to leave out: the audience you won't target this time, the message you won't lead with, the category you refuse to be put in. Then circle every "and" in your last brief. Each one may be a decision still waiting for an owner.
Get a fresh set of eyes. Ask your agency to bring in someone from their firm who doesn't work on your account and have them read the brief cold. Can they tell you who it's for, what you're asking people to think or feel, and what makes you different? Everyone close to the work fills in the gaps without noticing. Someone new can't, so they'll find the decisions the brief never made.
Read the brief again
By the time a brief is clear, most of the hard work has already been done, and very little of it was writing. Someone decided what the company does and what it doesn't. Someone chose the values that will cost something, the pillars that will carry the brand, and the story it will tell. The agency may have written every word. The choices belong to leadership.
That's why, when I look at a strong agency brief, I don't just see the foundation for good marketing. I see an organization that was willing to make choices.
And when a brief tries to be everything to everyone, I see a map of every decision still waiting to be made.
Because you can outsource research.
You can outsource strategy.
You can outsource creative.
You can even outsource the words.
But you can't outsource the decisions your leadership team hasn't made.
