Creative Brief Blueprint (eBook)

Objectives

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

We can paraphrase the exchange between the eponymous Alice and the grinning Cheshire Cat as “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” And this is a fundamental truth related to the creative brief: a clear objective is required. We have to know what the purpose of a communication is to both properly plan it and to ultimately gauge the success of the creative work. However, as we discuss in this chapter, for a number of reasons, setting a proper objective is easier said than done.

From another vantage point, imagine that we decide to host a dinner party. What is a successful party? Great food and great wine? Sure. An exciting theme or location? Possibly. An interesting and memorable experience? Probably. But wait, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s step back and think about the different reasons why we might host a dinner party. Perhaps the objective is to nurture relationships among old friends. Perhaps we are raising funds for a charitable cause. Perhaps we hope to sooth contentious work relationships. Or we might host a dinner party to broach the potential for a buyout with a competitor’s CEO. We might host a dinner party for a variety of reasons. And as the purpose for throwing the party changes, so does the specific objective of the party.

Clients often think of advertising objectives like the party. “Let’s just have great food and great wine” translates to “let’s make a great ad.” However, such reasoning is too broad and abstract; we need to have a clear eye to the end result to plan for success. Why do we need a more concrete objective? A clear objective affects how a caterer might plan the party. It provides guidance on who sits where, what food to serve, and how long the party will last. A proper objective also allows us to gauge success. For example, if the objective was to nurture friendships, success might be reflected by one or more guests extending an invitation to host a party in a month. If the objective was to ameliorate animosity, success might be measured by future interactions in the workplace.

In this chapter, we discuss how to set proper objectives in a creative brief and in an advertising or communication campaign. Core to this idea is that, while sales might often be the final objective for many firms, as strategists we need to be clear about the specific role the proposed execution plays in that process. Although advertising and communications can be directed at a promotion to increase sales; they often address issues that precede purchase, such as awareness or brand perception. The tighter the objective, the more focused the output.

Setting an Objective: The Basics

Where do objectives start? In most cases, the impetus for an advertising or communications project cascades down from an annual planning process. That is, at a higher level, an organization has set quarterly or yearly objectives. As part of this planning process, it is not uncommon to have an initiative to drive sales of a product or service in the upcoming period. As marketers or communication experts, we are tasked with discussing how communications can play a role in driving sales or other business objectives. Put differently, we have to ask what the objective of our communications is within the larger business objective.

To illustrate, consider for a moment that we are marketers in the beer industry. Our brand team might decide it is important to invest in the hard seltzer market. To do so, we may have an initiative of launching a new hard seltzer to the market and achieving a particular number of sales. As part of our marketing efforts, we might develop communications to increase consumer awareness of the product both at retail locations and at bars. Alternatively, instead of investing in the hard seltzer market, we might decide it is important to grow one of our well-known light beers by pushing its greater taste attribute. Here, the communication goal is not awareness; rather, the communication goal is forming or changing consumers’ opinion or attitude toward our product.

At this point, it is useful to call attention to an important distinction regarding business and communication objectives. Driving sales of a product or service is a business objective. The end goal in most for-profit firms is to improve the frequency and/or amount of sales or some derivation thereof. However, many paths exist to achieve sales growth. We could increase sales by growing the overall market. We could increase sales by stealing share from a specific competitor. We could grow sales by increasing loyalty or usage frequency among existing customers. Depending on which path we take, our communications will have a much different job to do. An effort to raise awareness, change attitudes, or drive a particular action (e.g., word of mouth, visiting a website) is a communication objective. To be most effective, we would say something different to encourage current users to increase buying frequency than we would say to nonusers to prompt entry into the category. While an advertising campaign or a communication initiative can facilitate sales, it plays a more specific role and it’s the strategist’s job to identify that specific role.

To elaborate, think about objectives or goals this way. We have our business objective (sales, profits, share, etc.). This objective can, in part, be accomplished through the behavior change of our target audience—new entrants to the category, switching/stealing occasions from a competitor, increasing usage or maintaining loyalty of existing customers. Driving this behavior change often requires awareness or attitudinal barriers that a firm must overcome. For example—the target is not aware of our brand; the target perceives that our product is not a good solution for a certain occasion; the target perceives that a competitor is superior on a key product dimension. Our job as strategists is to isolate the most important barrier to overcome; this barrier is integral to our communications objective. When we write a brief, we are providing the specific goal the initiative for which we are writing our brief is meant to accomplish. Said differently, we aren’t writing a business objective. We are writing a communication objective that helps the execution contribute to the business objective.

What makes for a good communication objective? Good communication objectives can be differentiated from bad objectives based on at least two properties. First, a good communication objective is specific. It should be focused on precisely what the message or execution is trying to achieve. Again, while sales might be a business objective, executions often attempt to facilitate that objective through some more specific means. As previously noticed, this is central to a communication objective—we focus on the most important barrier to overcome. A specific communication objective might center on one of a number of factors: awareness, product knowledge, attitude change, direct action, etc.

Second, a good objective is falsifiable. That is, it is empirically possible to collect data that can differentiate a successful and unsuccessful performance. We have often seen objectives written so that it is possible to find an angle or tell a story to validate the objective after the fact. For example, imagine we wrote our objective for launching our hard seltzer as “make people aware of our hard seltzer offering.” What does awareness mean? Does it mean that a local news outlet covers our brand? Does it mean we get people to follow our social media feed? How many? Is it successful if forty-seven people (or more) become aware of our hard seltzer? An easy way to make an objective falsifiable is to have a specific objective (e.g., awareness, attitudes, an action) linked to a desired quantity (e.g., 5 percent lift in awareness; 20 percent change in trial). Moreover, precision can be added by binding this quantitative objective to a specific time period (e.g., 5 percent lift in awareness and 20 percent change in trial within six months). With these basic ideas in mind, let’s discuss the value of setting objectives and how to be effective in doing so.

Value to Clients and Agencies

Understanding the distinction between business and communication objectives is important because it helps guide our agency or creative partner to create the most impactful work to achieve the specific communications objective. By achieving the specific communication objective, we in turn achieve the business objective. To understand the value of concrete objectives, let us start with an exercise we often use during our workshops with brands. For illustrative purposes, let’s imagine we are working on a campaign for Tesla’s automotive division and let us consider different objectives we could put in our creative brief.

Objective: Make an ad for Tesla. Yes, we’ve seen objectives that are as simple and concise as this one....