NBT #5: Brief or Bust

Plus, the worst rebrand experience I ever had.

Let's say you have 3 owners of a Chinese restaurant, and they need to agree on which chef to hire to run their restaurant.

They agree that it would be most efficient for them to split up and interview as many candidates as possible and return in a month with a recommended candidate.

They part ways and travel all over the world to interview various chefs. After a month, they reconvene.

Owner #1 says, "I have found the best chef to run our Chinese restaurant. She is a former recipient of the James Beard award from New York, and a master at combining traditional Chinese ingredients with classical French techniques."

Owner #2 says, "I have found the best chef to run our Chinese restaurant. I found him in Hunan where he runs the most popular restaurant in town. He can bring truly authentic Hunan cuisine to America."

Owner #3 says, "I thought we were opening a Chinese fast food spot, so I found someone with robust experience setting up and running a kitchen in Panda Express."

Obviously, these three owners had different visions for their Chinese restaurant. They could all be equally successful—a Chinese-French fusion restaurant sounds amazing, as does a traditional Hunan restaurant or a reliable Chinese-American takeout spot. But without alignment, it is impossible to move forward or to identify what success looks like.

That's why many design and brand agencies will refuse to work with you on revamping your brand, website, app design, etc. if you don't have a thoughtful, organized creative brief.

I find that most founders and entrepreneurs love working on their brands. However, so many of them waste time and money by failing to do the one thing that I consider to be the most important step in the process – writing and aligning all key stakeholders on a single creative brief.

Taking 2 extra weeks to develop a robust brief and align your team can potentially save you hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of frustrating conversations. Why wouldn't you take 2 weeks to correctly develop a brand that will last you 2 to 20 years??

If your answer is, "I just don't have time," it means you don't have time to redo your brand. Don't even bother getting started because you (and your creative partners) will not end up happy.

Case Study

I'll share a great example of my own failure to follow the above advice.

I had just joined a wealthtech company with two co-founders – one had a typical serial startup background and the other came from a traditional finance or Wall Street background. We'll call them Startup Steve and Wall Street Wilson.

Within my first month of starting the job, I requested that I run my typical process of gathering opinions and insights from key stakeholders across the firm, including both co-founders. Since we had an upcoming executive offsite, I asked if we could allocate 60 minutes to doing a brand workshop during which we could align on key concepts that would be included in the brand brief. The brand brief was to be shared with our creative agency who would deliver a new brand identity and website.

Despite pushing for some amount of time, in-person or via Zoom, to collect opinions from both founders, Startup Steve insisted that Wall Street Wilson would not have an opinion on brand direction, logos, or website design and that including him in ongoing brand-workshops would be a waste of time.

The best I could do was send out a short Google survey to try to get a superficial grasp of Wall Street Wilson's preferences.

I drafted the creative brief, which was heavily biased towards Startup Steve's preferences – quirky and different.

The designers spent about a month developing a few early concepts. After they delivered their early concepts, Startup Steve requested that the designers lean even further into the adjective "quirky."

However, this is where things began to take a bad turn. The co-founder, Wall Street Wilson, saw the early design concepts and suggested that the designers had a terrible understanding of our target audience and that we needed to look more like a traditional finance firm – trustworthy and established.

Not surprisingly, the designers pushed back and stated that Wall Street Wilson's request was completely contrary to what we had stated in our creative brief.

Needless to say, there was no scenario in which both founders would end up happy. After months of frustration, we finally found some middle ground. However, I was kicking myself for not following my typical process. Thankfully, the creative agency had worked with me several times before and knew that this was a bit of a fluke. I was still pretty mortified by the whole situation though.

This example just goes to show that even with a creative brief, success can be elusive unless you take appropriate steps and time to get stakeholder alignment on the brief itself.

So, how do I write a robust brand or website brief?

Stay tuned for my next few posts on:

1. How to write a kickass brand brief

2. How to write a foolproof website brief

I also have a video interview coming up with my absolute favorite creative agency, so be sure to Subscribe!