Theodore Levitt made a line famous at Harvard: people do not want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. Most briefs ask for a better drill.
Make the brand younger. Sell more units. Win back share. These are not problems. They are guesses at solutions, written down by someone who has been staring at the business for too long to see it.
The brief says what. The problem hides in why.
Clayton Christensen's team once studied why a fast food chain sold so many milkshakes in the morning. Making the shake thicker or sweeter did nothing. The real answer was the commute: people wanted something that lasted a long, boring drive and kept them full until lunch. They were not buying a milkshake. They were hiring it to do a job.
Every brief hides a job like that. Until you find it, every idea you write is a decoration on the wrong problem.
A brief is a symptom. The insight is the diagnosis.
Alshifa, the region's leading honey, briefed us about cheaper competitors. The real threat had no label at all: people believed that unbranded honey was more authentic. You cannot beat a belief on price. So we beat it with knowledge, and the brand became the experts of honey.
Five questions to ask of any brief
1. What does the audience believe today that the brand wishes they did not? That belief is usually the real competitor.
2. What is the brand afraid to say out loud? The thing nobody writes in the brief is often the problem itself.
3. What job is the customer hiring us to do? Not the product's job. Theirs.
4. Who or what loses if this works? A competitor, a habit, a stigma. Name it, and you know who you are really up against.
5. If we could only say one word, what would it be? If you cannot find it, the strategy is not finished.
Write the question back
Try this before the first idea: send the client their own brief, rewritten as a single question. When they agree with the question, the idea is half approved before it exists. When they disagree, you have just saved everyone a month.
Briefs are not instructions. They are invitations to find out what is really going on. Accept the invitation.
