That's what the brief on my desk says. It's pretty typical of most of the briefs on most agency desks in the UK, I guess. It's what clients do. They ring us or e-mail and ask for a website, a brochure, a PR piece. But it's going too far. Clients should be lazier when they brief.
What do I mean?
Those clients don't really want a brochure. They want their sales figures to go up. They don't really want a website, they want people to find them on the web and order things. They don't really want a press release, they want to change someone's mind somewhere. So what if a brochure won't do the job and a press release is a better idea? It takes a brave agency to say "NO - no brochure for you Mr Client, here's a brand extension instead." And it takes a very flexible client to listen.
Perhaps it's because the creative 'industry' (that term always makes me snigger) carves itself up into camps. There are 'design agencies', and 'PR agencies' and 'advertising agencies'. That makes clients think about outcomes, not objectives - makes them fix on the brochure rather than what the brochure should achieve.
But what if clients did what one of our hospitality clients has done this morning? What if they came to us and just dumped a big, steaming problem on our desks? This morning, our client said 'we want more people to visit our pubs on a certain night in the week - how could we get them to do it?'
No-one started talking about brochures or postcards or any other sort of outcome. We all started talking about the problem, why it was, what caused it, what influenced it and how we could solve it. Then, once we understood the problem, we started talking about the messages we'd need to use to solve it. And it was only then that we began thinking about the outcomes.
They got a solution that mixed PR, sales promotion and a bit of advertising. They wouldn't have got that mix if they'd specified the outcome rather than telling us their objective.
Try it next time you brief your agency.
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