Setting the direction –
how exemplary brand teams brief their agency partners

As a young brand manager, an ancient account director interrupted my unclear verbal brief to demand two things. First, he insisted, I must spend ten minutes telling him the things that would make the brief fail. He meant issues around compliance and claims, what the budget was and what major events, such as congresses and sales team meetings, that also had to be taken into account. “Tell me first what I mustn’t mess up,”  he said. Or something rather less printable. Then, he urged me to spend the rest of our long meeting telling him what would make the brief succeed. He asked for my marketing objectives, my market insights and something he called ‘Goldstein Needs’. 

I didn’t understand then, but have learned since, that what these three things are, and how they are communicated to the agency, is what differentiates excellent briefs from the merely adequate. What this older, wiser partner had done was teach me that the brief should first swiftly deal with the essential stuff that can make the campaign flop, but should then spend most of its time on what will make it fly. I now know the former are called ‘hygiene factors’, a term coined by the psychologist Frederick Herzberg, and that almost all briefs cover these in detail and in a consistent way. And because they are so well-addressed, they don’t differentiate good briefs from bad. The secret to excellent briefs lies in how they communicate the things that will make the campaign fly. So I’ll spend the rest of this article sharing those.

Another colleague-cum-teacher was fond of paraphrasing Lewis Carroll. He often told me that since I wasn’t clear about where I was headed, it didn’t much matter how I planned to get there. He was emphasising the importance of the marketing objectives in any brief. And indeed all briefs, even bad ones, now include a subheading of marketing objectives. What makes a brief excellent is when those objectives aren’t product oriented (‘increase sales X%’) or even market oriented (‘achieve Y% unprompted recall’) but are instead segment oriented. I discussed setting strong, segment-oriented marketing objectives in the first article in this series (Setting Your Sights, PME February 2025). That article also included how to validate your segment-oriented marketing objectives with four tests. If you want to begin your brief with strong and validated marketing objectives, look up the article at PMLive.com or email me for a copy.

Strong, validated, segment-oriented marketing objectives are necessary but not sufficient characteristics of how the best brand teams brief their agency partners. A second feature is the way they separate out the ultimate from the proximate. I learned this over many campaigns but I learned it first from Mr Johnson, my 1970s Latin teacher, who was fond of saying “A proxima ad ultimam”. Literally, this means ‘from the nearest to the furthest’ and Mr Johnson used it as an exhortation to reach our ultimate goals by considering the steps needed to achieve them. But his mantra always springs to mind when I see the way excellent briefs deconstruct their marketing objectives. Imagine, for example, that your ultimate goal is to achieve 30% share of an oncology market segment that prioritises quality of life over survival time. In that case, your proximate marketing objectives might be, first, 70% segment brand awareness and then, 50% segment recognition of your brand’s exceptional tolerability. By working backwards from your ultimate goal (eg, market share) to the proximate goals that precede it (eg, brand awareness and tolerability recognition), your brief becomes clearer and more effective.

By the time I wrote my 2007 book, ‘Creating Market Insight’, my first boss when I transitioned from R&D to marketing had retired. If he ever read it, he would have been flattered to find that one of the things he taught me about agency briefs was central to that book’s message. He used to ask me, gently but repeatedly, to tell him what I knew about our professionals, patients or payers that our rivals didn’t know. It was one of those questions that profoundly changed how I approached a market because it is a foundation issue in strategy and, consequently, any excellent agency brief.

‘Every brand team should ask, if self-actualisation is the strongest driver of an individual’s behaviour, how could our brand harness that drive?’

It took me years of academic research to crystallise his guidance into something more intellectually rigorous. I now tell students and clients that for their brief to be excellent it must contain VRIO insight. That is, it must contain some knowledge that is valuable, rare, inimitable and that the organisation can use. The acronym VRIO actually comes from Professor Jay Barney and his Resource-Based View of the firm, but stripped of its academic plumage it means: ‘What do we know that our competitors don’t?’ VRIO insights are rare and seldom come from purchased market research. Rather, they almost always emerge from the creative synthesis of quantitative and qualitative knowledge. And, because much of most firm’s knowledge is implicit or tacit, buried in the heads of the brand team, it often needs sophisticated methods to make it explicit and usable. Wherever they come from, VRIO insights – along with deconstructed marketing objectives – are a defining characteristic of an excellent agency brief.