Your Brief Is the Middle of the Story, Not the Start

By Daniel Sherrard, Head of Strategy, Lewis Moberly

The brief lands. Everyone nods. The work begins.

It feels like the start. Really, it’s somewhere in the middle.

Under the pressure of time and targets, many briefs arrive with the problem already narrowed down, a few assumptions hardened into fact, and the answer more or less decided.

That comes at a cost. More than 500 UK marketers and agency staff surveyed by BetterBriefs estimated that 26% of their marketing budgets are wasted on poor briefs and misdirected work. That’s a quarter of the budget.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether the brief is good enough. It’s whether the right conversations happened before it was written.

The conversation before the contract

Brand and design agencies often come in late for a simple reason. A brief is essentially a contract. It sets out what the agency, and often the marketer, will be judged against. Nobody wants to share a contract before it’s ready, and once it’s through internal sign-off, it’s hard to reopen.

Agencies like ours are most useful earlier, in the conversation about the business, its category and its ambitions, before the challenge is fixed. That’s where client and agency can interrogate the business need together and find the brief behind the brief. Sometimes it reveals a different creative challenge. Sometimes it isn’t a design challenge at all, but one of production, for instance, or how the portfolio is organised.

When the ask isn’t the need

Even a clear brief can ask for the wrong thing. It’s like asking a builder for a wall, when the better question is whether you need one.

A brief might ask for more consistency, when what the brand really needs is an identity that holds together but can flex. It might ask how to justify a higher price, when the real need is to make the brand feel more valuable.

Reasonable requests. Just not the real problem.

The Design Business Association’s 2024 What Clients Think research found that 30% of clients wish their agency would ask more questions and dig deeper. As one client put it: “I’m obviously not being clear – but they’re the experts, they should be able to drag it out of me.”

That’s fair. And it’s on us. Being the experts clients hire us to be starts with a simple question: why this?

So the best time to bring in an agency isn’t when you decide you need some design. It’s when you ask: “We need to achieve this business or brand objective. Could brand and design thinking help us get there?”

Use your agency to bake distinctiveness into the brief

Most businesses know their category inside out, but that expertise can become an echo chamber. Brands end up signposting their category rather than standing out in it.

Working with our clients, whatever the category, from personal care to prestige to food and drink, the opportunity often starts with spotting, together, where that’s happening. The way out takes many forms, from a new brand idea, to a visual language borrowed from a neighbouring category, to truths and assets in the brand’s own past that need to be resurfaced.

That’s why the conversation before a brief is locked matters. Which conventions are worth keeping? What distinctiveness should you lean into? Where is there room to flex, or to break with convention?

Early collaboration is an investment, not a delay

Yes, bringing more people in earlier can feel slower. So does reading the instructions. Both save time in the end.

The alternative is costly. A brief gets written, the work gets made, and only then does everyone realise they’ve been solving the wrong problem, or the wrong articulation of it. That’s where much of that 26% goes.

The upside is just as big. Kantar found creative quality can multiply advertising profitability by up to twelve times. There’s little reason to think brand and design are any different. And creative quality starts with the brief.

The strongest work starts when client and agency find the brief behind the brief together, while there’s still time to point all that creative thinking, and all that investment, at the right challenge.