Right then, listen up. I see you lot tapping away on your keyboards, writing your big, important briefs. You get to the ‘Objectives’ box and fill it with the usual impressive-sounding waffle: ‘1. Build Awareness. 2. Drive Sales. 3. Increase Brand Loyalty.’
It makes you feel very strategic. And it makes your agency want to go and lie down in a quiet field.
Why? Because it’s woolly nonsense. And trust me, I’m an expert in things that are woolly. Those objectives are so vague. They’re the strategic equivalent of me telling the farmer, “Grow more grass.” It gives your agency no clue about where to fight or how to win.
The problem is, your brief is a blank canvas, and creativity doesn’t thrive on infinite freedom; it thrives on a Beautiful Constraint—a sharp, interesting problem to solve. You need to realise that “Drive Sales” isn’t an objective, it’s a wish. And the difference between a wish and a strategy is a single, specific, well-defined buying situation.
From a Woolly Wish to a Beautiful Constraint
A sharp brief pairs a bold ambition with a beautiful constraint. It says to your agency: “Our ambition is to grow by 10%. But here’s the beautiful constraint: you must achieve it by winning this one specific moment in a customer’s life.”
Take the soft drinks aisle. It’s a sea of fizzy water and lookalike cans. A brand that just vaguely wants to “increase sales” will get lost. But a smart brand uses beautiful constraints to pick a specific fight it can win.
This is where the humans I work for come in. Our Brand Health Tracking is the tool that finds your beautiful constraint. It uses Category Entry Points to create a simple, one-page map of your market, showing you and your agency:
The Field: All the key buying situations for your category.
Your Patch: Which of these situations your brand is currently associated with.
The Greener Grass: The valuable patches your competitors own that are ripe for the taking.
Suddenly, your brief is transformed. A woolly objective like “Build awareness” becomes a laser-focused, commercial mission:
Own the “Friday night pizza on the sofa” occasion.
Become the automatic answer for “I need a boost of energy to get through the afternoon.”
Steal the “I need a drink for my young kids’ moment from your competitors.
Now, you and your agency has a sharp problem to solve and your creative reviews are infinitely easier. The work isn’t judged against a vague feeling, but against a clear mission.
And here’s an example of how this might play out if we took the example of ‘I need a drink for my young kids’ in a “Get Who To By” brief format…
GET: Parents of children under 11
WHO: Want to give their kids a joy-filled childhood, but feel the immense pressure to create a perfect, Instagrammable childhood for their kids.
TO: Buy our brand of soft drink
BY: creating a brand that wages war on the curated childhood & celebrates beautiful chaos – the official, unapologetic fuel for messy, loud, joy-filled moments that would never make it to Instagram.
What an exciting brief that would be to work on eh!
This is the power of banishing woolly objectives.
This is the power of our Brand Health tracking.
It acts as the shining light, using CEP evaluation to uncover the specific moments that matter. It provides the proof you need for genuinely sharp brief writing….turning woolly into wonderful.
📧 Rich@bamboozled.co
🖥️ https://bamboozled.co/
🧠 Brand Health/CEPs: https://lnkd.in/e7pMckHf
#MentalAvailability #CategoryEntryPoints #MarketingScience #BrandHealth #Bamboozled #LessBumphMoreOoomph
