Creative brief

In practice

A brief that is merely fine is a failure, because everything downstream inherits its vagueness. The test is whether a creative team could start work without asking a single follow-up question: and whether the criteria for judging what comes back are already written down.

A constraint that only a brief can carry shows in the Accenture naming of 2000. Fortune reports that "Accenture" was the only candidate beginning with "AC", which matched the A with a superscript C in the Andersen Consulting logo. That is a requirement a team can use only if it is written down before generation, and the same article describes thousands of original and submitted names to work through.

In a naming project the brief is what makes the cut possible. What goes wrong is a brief written as a wish list: tone words, no constraints, no ranking, so every candidate can be defended and none can be rejected. Keep the walls and the wishes apart, name who decides, and write the criteria before the first candidate exists. The naming-specific version is the naming brief, and the checklist is in The naming brief: what to write down before anyone names.

Where this sits in the process

The studio treats this as part of a single run rather than a separate service: the category is read, the creative direction is chosen from what the research found, candidates are generated in volume and then cut against criteria that were written down first. See how the studio works for what that produces, or the naming module for the stages themselves.

Related concepts

• Naming brief: What belongs in a naming brief, and why the markets and languages have to be named before generation starts.
• Brand strategy: What a brand strategy has to settle before naming begins, and what happens to creative work when it has not.
• Creative driver: Why naming teams work from chosen directions instead of free association, and what a driver actually contains.

Further reading

• The naming brief: what to write down before anyone names: A naming brief is finished when a team can start without one follow-up question. The six decisions it has to settle, and what to write when you do not know yet.