Writing a creative brief is about much more than telling a creative team what your challenge is and who it’s with; it’s about educating them, enlightening them and, most importantly, inspiring them to think beyond the obvious to develop innovative creative solutions that will drive behaviour change in the audience.  

This could have been an article about what makes a good creative brief – a step-by-step guide to the essential parts you need to include to find the sweet spot between a ‘fill in the blanks’ brief and War and Peace –  but it is not. The first reason for this is that Page and Page & Partners’ founders, Stephen and Kate Page, have already written Forget the Box: a comprehensive guide to writing a good creative brief. The second reason is that in the Autumn of 2022, we at Page & Page and Partners undertook some research into what constitutes a great creative brief, and the results revealed something rather disturbing.  

Across the survey participants, most of whom are directly responsible for marketing strategy in global or EMEA roles at pharmaceutical, medical device, biotech and general healthcare companies, the majority of respondents noted that they consider eye-catching creative and greater differentiation as more important than basing the creative on genuine insights when it comes to the effectiveness of a campaign.  

The importance of trust  

Why is this so worrying? Eye-catching creative and strong differentiation really are vital aspects in enhancing campaign effectiveness. However, this response leads us to question whether in an increasingly crowded marketplace, fraught with issues such as rising expenditures and problems with supply chains, companies are slipping into red-ocean territory. Are they forgetting about the need to resonate with audiences beyond creating an advert that is shinier than their competitors? It’s also concerning when we think about the current epidemic of distrust, which is rife around the world.  

The 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer report demonstrates that people are more distrustful than ever, losing faith in both governments and corporations alike.¹ The reasons for this are easy to understand: against the backdrop of the pandemic and increased global political turmoil, people want to know who and what they can trust.  

Trust is essential to the success of any brand. In fact, trust is the very reason that the idea of a ‘brand’ exists at all. If we think anthropologically about the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, and the movement of communities from rural, countryside economies to industrialised, urban sprawl, we can understand why brands started coming out of the woodwork. People could no longer rely on buying the products they needed from a trusted neighbour or community member and had to buy from strangers. This paved the way for brands to emerge and over time they came to represent trust.  

Fast-forward 200 years to 2022, a time when 63% of people believe that business leaders are purposefully trying to mislead consumers to buy their products or services by making exaggerated or false claims.¹ As costs continue to rise apace in the healthcare industry, it’s more important than ever to inspire and reinforce trust among the audience, to give them the encouragement they need to spend their budgets with you, and so that you can make every bit of your own marketing budget count.  

What does all this talk about trust have to do with a great creative brief, you might wonder? An insight is purely a deeper understanding of the truth of your customer’s challenge, and therefore a great campaign brief must have insight at its heart in order to inspire your team to develop a creative solution which will really resonate. With this in mind, you can see why we found it so worrying that the majority of our survey respondents did not place insight as the most important factor in creating an impactful campaign, can’t you?  

Understanding insight and thinking differently 

The term insight is all too often misunderstood. For some, the very word ‘insight’ is sullied by its association with overcomplicated branding tools and processes, which result in creative that doesn’t even make sense to the team that developed it. For others, it is oversimplified, relying on findings that tell us what the audience needs, rather than giving us a deeper understanding of ‘why’ they need it. But while simple findings might tell us what the audience is doing, insights allow us to understand why they are doing it, ultimately allowing us to speak more directly to that inner truth.  

Marsha Williams, President of Harvest Research Group and former Senior Vice President of Brand & Consumer Insights at Nickelodeon and MTV, states: “…while findings are free to be trivial and merely interesting (or not), insights bear a much greater responsibility. Findings are often nice to know; insights should be considered need to know.” ²  

And Marsha is right. Insights bear a responsibility, and so do we: the responsibility to discover them and then ensure that they are included in the creative brief so that teams can develop creative that will resonate with the audience’s truth.   

Insights are all the more essential because they provide the key to unlock our ability to think differently, to see a challenge through other people’s eyes and to come up with an innovative solution that will cause the change in behaviour that is needed. To echo, Apple’s iconic 1997 tagline, ‘think different’ is a phrase that should be pertinent throughout the development of the creative brief. A great brief should not be a ‘copy and paste’. We all feel the pressures of a fast-paced industry, in fact, more than 90% of our survey participants noted that the need to meet annual objectives or goals set by leadership is their top priority. These pressures can make us more inclined to economise our time, or even to cut corners, but it is imperative that we are not tempted to reuse past briefs with just a handful of details updated or skip the insight mining process.  

A creative brief needs to empower your team or agency to push the boundaries and think outside the box, and each brief requires a fresh approach if we are to avoid creating campaigns that are also a ‘copy and paste’.  

Developing a creative brief that encourages all involved to go against the grain will help your brand carve out a space in the market, moving closer to a blue-ocean strategy where it can sail unencumbered by competitors whose communications all say the same thing as yours.  

To create this sustainable space, we have to move away from competing on the features of our offering and start appealing to the human truth within the audience, to overcome confirmation bias and the fear of the unknown by inspiring trust in our purpose and the value we bring. There are many examples of brands that have communicated their mission, why their customers should trust them, through their creative outputs. Take Patagonia, which has always pursued a unique mission in the fashion industry, to “Build the best product. Cause no unnecessary harm. Use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis”, which it has communicated through differentiated creative outputs to ensure that consumers not only notice them, but trust them, setting them apart from competitors in an industry which has been notorious for frequent mistruths and questionable ethics.  

Patagonia’s 2011 ‘Don’t buy this jacket’ campaign is a wonderful example of this, where instead of trying to sell consumers a new jacket, Patagonia inspired them to embark on a journey of sustainability in partnership with them. The campaign raised awareness of the high environmental cost of making new clothing, and sales rose by 30%.³ Fifty years from its creation, Patagonia continues to follow their purpose, and in September the news was reported around the world that all of the company’s profits would now go to organisations to help fight the climate crisis. As the famous BBH black sheep advert for Levi’s in the 1980s tells us: “When the world zigs, zag.” 

Key principles for a great brief 

There are many important aspects to nailing a brief. But not all briefs are created equal, and to help give yours the edge that will inspire your agency or creative team, we recommend always considering the following principles. 

1.  Find your truth. What is it that your brand stands for? What is the truth at the heart of the audience? Once you find that key insight into their needs, their hopes and their dreams, then you can build a strategy and develop creative that will not just attract attention for a second because it’s more sparkly than your competitor’s, but will drive lasting behaviour change in the audience because it lights that spark of belief that you can give them what they truly need. 

2.  Allow yourself to be different. Don’t hop on the bandwagon and create a campaign or an asset just because everyone around you is doing so. Once you have discovered that human insight, set sail for a blue-ocean strategy and empower your agency or creative team to take your brand somewhere new. When it comes to the creative brief, don’t ‘copy and paste’ what you’ve done before. You don’t want your creative team to come up with a solution that you’ve used before, so use the brief as an opportunity to inspire them to think about your challenge in a different way.  

Adopting these two principles can help you to develop creative briefs that will light a spark in the minds of a creative team, helping them to see the world through the audience’s eyes so that they can develop creative outputs that help the audience to see the how your offering can make their world a better place. As Maya Angelou said: “We are only as blind as we want to be.”  

Originally published in Innovation Uncovered. Written by Eliza Hancock, Page & Page and Partners

References 

1. Edelman Trust Barometer. 2022. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2022-trust-barometer  
2. Marsha Williams. Insights vs Findings: Lessons learned from the trenches. 2007
3. https://bettermarketing.pub/dont-buy-this-jacket-patagonia-s-daring-campaign-2b37e145046b