How to brief a branding agency

Most briefs we receive are lists. Logo, guidelines, website, maybe a launch campaign. A budget, sometimes. A deadline, always. They are written to get a quote, and they get one. What they do not get is the agency’s best thinking, because the thinking was never asked for.

This guide is for a founder or marketing lead about to approach branding agencies. It covers why the brief matters more than the pitch, what to put in and what to leave out, why being open about budget gets you better answers, how to compare the responses, and a template you can copy.

Why the brief matters more than the pitch

Agencies will tell you a great deal in a pitch. Most of it is about them. The brief is the one document in the process that is about you, and it sets the terms of everything that follows. A brief that asks for a logo gets logo proposals. A brief that describes a business problem gets proposals that solve it, from agencies who are good at solving it, and quietly filters out the ones who are not.

The brief also becomes the contract for the thinking. Months later, when a design is on the table and someone asks “is this right?”, the brief is what you check it against. If the brief only lists deliverables, the only check available is taste. If it describes the change you wanted, there is a real answer.

Start with the problem, not the deliverables

Nobody needs a logo. They need the thing a logo is supposed to do. So begin the brief with what is wrong, and what you want to be different when the work is done.

The quickest route is a sentence we ask every client to finish:

● “When this is done, people will finally understand that we…”

If you can finish it, you have the heart of the brief. Put it at the top. Everything the agency proposes can be judged on whether it would make that sentence true.

If you cannot finish it, say so. “We know something is wrong and we cannot yet name it” is a legitimate brief, and a better one than a confident list of the wrong deliverables. A good agency will begin with research rather than design, and you will end up commissioning a better project than the one you first imagined. We wrote about this in Clients don’t buy logos.

What to include: business, audience, ambition, budget, timing, who decides

A useful brief fits on two pages and answers six questions.

01  The business. What you do, for whom, how you make money, where you are in your life as a company. Founded when, how many people, where. What is changing: a raise, a launch, a new market, a new product. Be concrete. A paragraph of facts beats a page of vision.

02  The audience. Who must this work persuade? Customers, investors, hires, partners? Describe the most important one as a person: what they do, what they currently buy instead, what they believe about you today and what you need them to believe. If you have customer research, quotes or reviews, include them. The customer’s own words are the most valuable thing you can give an agency.

03  The ambition. What does success look like, in business terms? More of which customers? A higher price? A faster sales cycle? Hiring the people you currently cannot? Put a number on it if you can, and say over what period. Then the agency can design for an outcome, and you can measure one.

04  The budget. A figure or a range. There is a whole section on this below, because it is the item most often left out and the one that most changes the quality of the answers.

05  The timing. When you need the work, and why that date. A fixed launch is a different brief from “as soon as sensible”. Include any dates that will shape the project: a funding round, a trade show, a product release.

06  Who decides. Who will sign off the work, how many people that is, and how the decision is made. One founder is a different project from a board of six. Name the day-to-day contact too. Agencies price for the way decisions get made, whether or not you tell them.

Add the practical context: what exists already (identity, guidelines, website, research), what must be kept, any constraints such as a name you cannot change or a parent brand you must sit beneath. And list what you think you need, clearly labelled as your current best guess rather than a specification.

What to leave out

Three things make briefs worse.

The solution. “We want a minimalist identity in navy and gold with a serif.” You may be right. But if you have already decided, you are hiring hands, not minds, and you will pay for minds anyway. Describe the feeling you want the customer to have, and let the agency propose how to create it. If you have references, say what you like about them rather than asking for them to be copied.

The kitchen sink. Twelve pages of history, every competitor, the full product roadmap. The agency needs enough to understand the problem, not everything you know. Put the rest in an appendix or offer it on request.

The hedge. Briefs written to avoid commitment, with no budget, no decision-maker and no measure of success, produce proposals written the same way. Vagueness is contagious. The same goes for “premium” left unfinished; Premium compared to what? explains why.

Why being open about budget gets you better answers

Clients hide the budget for a reasonable fear: if the agency knows the number, they will spend all of it. Here is what actually happens when the budget is missing.

The agency guesses. If they guess high, you get a proposal you cannot afford and both sides have wasted a week. If they guess low, you get a thinner project than you could have had, and the good agency you wanted may decline to pitch because it looks too small. Either way you are comparing proposals that were written to different, invisible numbers, which makes comparison impossible.

A budget is not an instruction to spend. It is information about scale. Tell an agency the figure and they can tell you honestly what it buys, what it does not, and where they would put the emphasis. That is the conversation you want. If you genuinely do not know, give a range, or say what the work would be worth to you if it succeeded. Any honest agency can work from that. Ask, too, whether the work should be a fixed-fee project or a monthly partnership; Project or partnership explains how to choose.

How to compare the responses

Three proposals, three different formats, three prices. Compare them on the same six questions.

01  Did they understand the problem? Does the proposal restate your challenge in a way that is sharper than you wrote it? Or does it restate your deliverables?

02  Is there thinking before design? Research, strategy, a stage where the brief is tested before anything is drawn. Proposals that go straight to design are cheaper and usually weaker.

03  Who will actually do the work? The people in the pitch and the people on the project are not always the same. Ask.

04  What is included, precisely? Pages, templates, rounds of revision, copy, content, launch, what happens after. Make a grid and fill it in for each proposal. The gaps are where the cost differences live.

05  What will you own? Files, source, logins, rights. The answer should be everything, once paid.

06  Did they push back? An agency that disagrees with part of your brief, and says why, is showing you what they will be like to work with. That is usually a good sign.

Then meet the two you like best, and pay attention to how they ask questions. The one that asks the question you had not thought of is usually the one to hire. Our Approach page shows how we structure that first stage, and the FAQs cover timing, process and ownership.

A brief template you can copy

Copy this into a document, answer each point in a few sentences, and send it. Two pages is plenty.

01  The sentence. When this is done, people will finally understand that we…

02  The business. What we do, for whom, how we make money. Founded, size, location. What is changing and why now.

03  The problem. What is wrong, described in the customer’s world. What it is costing us.

04  The audience. Who must this persuade. The most important one as a person. What they believe now, what they need to believe. Any research, quotes or reviews attached.

05  The alternatives. Who we are compared with, including doing nothing. What they say about themselves.

06  The ambition. What success looks like in business terms, with a number and a period where possible.

07  What exists. Current identity, guidelines, website, research, content. What must be kept. Constraints.

08  What we think we need. Our best guess at the deliverables, open to challenge.

09  Budget. A figure or a range, and whether it includes production, photography and media.

10  Timing. When we need it, why that date, and other dates that matter.

11  Who decides. Sign-off, how many people, how decisions are made. Day-to-day contact.

12  How to respond. What we would like back, by when, and what happens next.

If you would like us to respond to yours, send us your brief. We reply within one working day, and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit. Our Brand Strategy page describes what a project with us covers.

Brief the problem and the change you want, share the budget, and judge the responses on their thinking. The deliverables follow.