Let’s talk about marketing objectives, because most briefs that come through are cooked.
Not bad, not wrong, just trying to do way too much at once. You’ll see it straight away. “We want to launch a new product, build awareness, drive sales, increase retention, grow brand love, make people feel something, make them smile, make them remember us forever and maybe tattoo the logo on their arm like No Ragrets”.
All in one brief. Cool. So what are we actually doing?
I get why it happens. Businesses have pressure. Stakeholders want their thing in there. Everyone’s got a KPI they’re accountable for. So the brief becomes this big bucket of expectations. Let’s just do it all. Kill a few birds with one stone. Except you don’t. You miss all of them. You burn time, waste budget, dilute the idea, and end up putting something into the world that looks fine, sounds fine, feels safe, and achieves not much.
The best marketers I’ve worked with never do this.
The best briefs are actually boring on paper!
They’re clear, tight, precise. They answer one question. What are we actually trying to do here? Not ten things, not a wishlist, one thing.
Part of the problem is people mix up objectives. There are layers to it. You’ve got business objectives. That’s the big stuff. Revenue, growth, market share, what the board cares about. Then marketing objectives. Acquisition, penetration, retention, sales, moving the business forward. Then brand objectives. Awareness, trust, consideration, long term memory, the stuff that compounds over time. All important.
All valid. None of them are the brief.
The brief is the communication objective. What do we want people to actually think, feel or do after seeing this? That’s it. That’s the fucking job…
Say you’re launching a new pair of jeans. Not just any jeans, these are four way stretch, proper innovation, denim Jesus. The brief is not “drive sales, increase retention, build loyalty, grow brand love, educate the consumer”.
The brief is simple. Make some noise. Get attention. Break what people expect from denim. Make people stop scrolling and actually care. Everything else flows from that.
Another thing people get wrong is KPIs. They start loading the brief with metrics. We need to increase traffic, improve conversion, hit this number. That’s fine, but that’s not the job of the idea. That’s how you measure whether it worked.
The job is to create something worth noticing in the first place.
The simplest way I’ve ever seen this explained was with pens. Take a few pens, throw three at someone and tell them to catch them. They panic, miss most of them, maybe get lucky with one. Now throw one. They catch it. That’s it. That’s the whole point.
You might be able to hit two objectives if everything lines up perfectly, but most of the time it’s one, and the more you try to add, the more you water everything down.
Strategy isn’t about adding more thinking. It’s about removing everything that doesn’t matter so the one thing that does actually lands.
If your brief is trying to do everything, it’s not a strategy, it’s a wishlist.
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💀 🖤
Cheers,
DANIEL JACOBS
http://www.thecreativestrategist.com.au
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia
THE CREATIVE STRATEGIST 