How to brief a brand strategist: what to send, what to say, what to leave out

A good brief to a brand strategist does three things: it explains the decision you are trying to make, it describes your current situation without dressing it up, and it hands over the material that already exists. Most briefs cover the third and skip the first two, which is why so many projects begin with a fortnight of reconstruction rather than analysis.

What does a brand strategist actually need from a brief?

The instinct when briefing is to explain your business. That matters, but it is not the scarcest information. What a strategist cannot work out alone is why you are commissioning strategy now, and what you will do differently once you have it.

Three things make the difference. First, the trigger: something has changed, or something has stopped working, and that event usually tells the strategist more about the real problem than any description of the business will. Second, the decision waiting on the other side of the work, whether that is a website rebuild, a pricing change, a new market or a hiring plan. Third, the constraints, meaning budget, timing, existing commitments and anything already decided that is not up for reconsideration.

Without those three, a strategist has to infer intent from evidence, and inference costs time you have paid for.

What should you send, and what can you leave out?

Founders often over-prepare in one direction and under-prepare in another. Polished decks arrive while the messy, revealing material stays in a drawer. The table below sets out how I would weight it.

The rule of thumb: send evidence of how the business currently behaves and how the market currently responds. Send less of what you would like to be true.

How do you describe your current situation without leading the answer?

There is a difference between a hypothesis and an instruction. "We think we are being seen as a generalist and it is costing us on price" is a hypothesis, and a genuinely helpful one, because it gives the strategist something specific to test. "We need to reposition as a premium specialist" is an instruction, and it forecloses the analysis you are paying for.

State what you suspect. Label it as a suspicion. Then say what would change your mind. That single addition turns your assumptions into something workable rather than something the strategist has to politely dismantle.

The same applies to your description of your clients. Rather than describing your ideal client in demographic terms, describe your last five clients: how they found you, what they bought, what they said when they were deciding, and whether you would want ten more like them. Actual clients are more informative than imagined ones, and the gap between the two is frequently the finding.

What are the most common briefing mistakes?

Four come up repeatedly.

Presenting a resolved position that is not resolved internally. If two directors disagree about which market you serve, the brief should say so. Papering over it means the strategy is delivered into an argument nobody named, and adoption fails afterwards.

Withholding commercial reality. Declining revenue, a client concentration risk, a funding deadline, a partner leaving. These are not embarrassments, they are the shape of the problem. A strategist working without them will produce a recommendation that is elegant and unusable.

Confusing the brief with the outcome. You are not briefing a deliverable, you are briefing a problem. Specifying the format of the answer before the question has been examined tends to narrow the answer to something you could have written yourself.

Sending everything and prioritising nothing. A shared drive with two hundred files is not a brief. Ten well-chosen documents with one line each explaining what they are and whether they are current is worth considerably more.

Who should be involved before the brief is written?

For a small business, usually the founder alone, with one caveat: if someone else handles sales or client delivery, ask them what clients say and include it. Their account will differ from yours, and the difference matters.

For a larger organisation, gather input before writing rather than circulating a draft afterwards. A brief written by committee tends to be a list of everyone's priorities, which gives the strategist no signal about what actually matters. One person should write it, having asked the others what they would change about how the business is understood. Where views genuinely diverge, record the divergence in the brief. Internal disagreement discovered at the point of delivery is far more expensive than internal disagreement declared at the start.

How does briefing work when the engagement is document-led and remote?

My engagements are delivered remotely and are document-led, meaning you receive a written strategy you own rather than a presentation you attend. That places more weight on the written brief than a call-heavy process would, and in my experience that is an advantage rather than a limitation.

Writing your situation down forces precision. Ambiguity that survives a conversation rarely survives being typed out. Clients often tell me the act of preparing the brief clarified something before the work began, which is a reasonable indication that the discipline is doing its job.

Practically, this means: write in continuous prose rather than bullet fragments where you can, because the reasoning between your points is often the useful part. Answer questions in writing rather than deferring them to a discussion. And if something changes mid-project, a funding round, a departure, a lost client, send it through immediately rather than waiting to mention it.

What does a well-briefed project feel like?

The early stage is quiet. There is no back and forth establishing what you sell or who buys it, because that was settled in the brief. Questions that do arrive are specific and probing rather than foundational. The first substantive document responds to the problem you actually named, and you recognise your business in it, including the parts you were reluctant to write down.

That is the real return on a careful brief. Not speed for its own sake, but the strategist spending their attention on judgement rather than on reconstruction. You are paying for thinking. The brief determines how much of it you get.