Better Briefs = Better Projects
You have something you need – a new website perhaps, or a bit of a makeover of your brand, or even a whole new brand for a whole new company. You’ve done your research and found an agency you like and want to work with – so now you just need to give them the brief – tell them what your idea is and what the budget is – and away you go!
Simple, right? Well, no.
Projects can go wrong for any number of different reasons, but, in general, if the brief is wrong then a project is bound to go wrong at some stage of the delivery journey. That’s not to say the project will fail. But it does mean the process will be harder, longer and generally more frustrating for everyone.
This is bad for us all. It’s bad for you as the client, obviously, as you have to spend more time overseeing and worrying about the budget, and it’s bad for us as we’re spending time rescuing something instead of creating, developing and delivering success.
And it turns out that what we hear anecdotally, that the problem is widespread, is indeed true. The fabulous team at the Better Briefs project has done some research into the scale of the problem and how it can be resolved through a recent, global survey.
They found that most people surveyed agreed that it is difficult to produce good creative work without a good brief but, despite this, the brief is too often neglected. 92% of the creative agencies surveyed agreed that they are neglected.
And this leads to massive waste. Shockingly, it is estimated that 1/3 of marketing budgets are wasted on poor briefs and misdirected work.
So, how do we make this better?
You are the experts in your business and we are the experts in business, so as Dave Trott so brilliantly explains by drawing on his own experience: Brief us by telling us the WHAT and we’ll work out HOW.
As the Better Briefs team recommends, we don’t want, as an agency, to passively accept what we know to be bad briefs. We want to work with you to create a strong brief, which we both understand, have confidence in and which we can deliver on for you.
Our commitment to you therefore is:
- To listen, properly, both to what you don’t say as well as what you do.
- We will ask questions, probably quite a few, until we are totally clear on what’s required.
- We won’t take on the project until we’re all clear and we’re confident we know what success is for you, and that we can achieve that.
- We’ll do our own research, not give you an old solution repackaged.
Think we’ve missed something? Let us know!
