Benefits of a Creative Brief
Riding on the coattails of our last article, How To: Guarantee a Successful Design Project, our next article will discuss what a designer or design firm can do to help their clients better understand their company, their reasons for wanting to begin their marketing campaign, and how to execute their marketing campaign.
The simple and short solution? The Creative Brief.
The Purpose of a Creative Brief
What’s a “creative brief?” What purpose does it serve?
In the most basic form, a creative brief is a series of questions that are targeted to help formulate a project’s concept, strategy and means of direction and execution. There are, no doubt, thousands of variations on such questions, but they all share one common goal: to determine the goals of a project and how to best formulate the methods of execution in a manner that will be understood clearly by the desired target audience.
What Sort of Questions to Expect
The type of questions you might expect from a creative brief vary in detail and subject matter.
However, here are a few sample questions you might run into on a creative brief:
- Have you previously branded your business or conducted marketing campaigns?
- What are your goals for this project?
- What is your target audience?
- What do you want them to know about your business?
- What action do you want your target audience to take based on this project?
- Describe your business using 5 separate adjectives
- What sort of timeline for this project do you have in mind?
How a Creative Brief Helps
The reason these questions that a creative brief poses are beneficial are because they assist in pinpointing what the purpose of a campaign is and who it should be directed toward. If questions such as those go unanswered, one could more or less guarantee themselves (at best) an unsuccessful campaign or (at worst) an absolute disaster of a project.
The goal in the questions asked are to generate strategy. To assist in planning. To aid in design. To structure communication.