Decoding a creative brief: The Six Quadrant Method

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Shyam Gursahani and I'm the founder and Strategy Director at Albatrot, a marketing agency with clients across six different countries. I have over 13 years of experience as a marketing professional and an MBA from the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School, with a specialization in Strategy and Marketing, I've built my career executing several award winning integrated marketing campaigns for a host of different brands across FMCG, automobiles, aviation, technology, hospitality, insurance, healthcare, finance, and entertainment. At Albatrot, my work focuses primarily on marketing strategy, performance marketing, and campaign conceptualization. In this class, I'm going to take you through The Six Quadrant framework of taking a client brief. This framework allows you to structure the collection of information from your client. Once you've completed this class, some of you will realise that you may be asking the same questions some or all of the time when taking a brief, However, I will teach you how to put these questions into a system that helps you get the correct brief every single time, allowing you to translate that effectively into the right output for your clients. This class is aimed towards students who work in any service business. Having said that, the points discussed today will be more focussed towards the marketing, branding, design industry. Students, will typically we Design, copy, content freelancers who deal with clients daily, The agency person, like me, who works with clients from different industries, and anyone from the service industry, consultants, recruiters, and the like. Once you've mastered this unique framework of brief taking, you'll not only be able to impress your clients, with your thorough approach, but also drive actual results with the help of structured information at your fingertips. 2. Project: Your project in this class is to pick a brief from a brand you currently work with. and add it to this model. If the information you are able to add is not enough to fill all the sections of this model. That's okay. At least you know what you need to do the next time you're out there. On the other hand, if you have extra or additional information that doesn't fit into the model, it could mean that you're spending time and effort in a meeting, gathering information that is not necessary to deliver on the objectives. And if you don't already have a brand brief, then try using this framework the next time you're getting a brief from a client, Either way, share a note that covers your observations and experience. The final outcome will include seven slides, 1 for each section of the model, with an additional slide for your observations. 3. Overview: Life can be ambiguous, but a client brief shouldn't be. A 3 year old was about to hit his head at the platground. So I asked him to duck, in what seemed like one swift motion, he quacked at me and ran into a tree. As a service business. We often find ourselves at the receiving end of unhelpful information. Poor communication often translates to poor results, driving a wedge in relationships and Business. And the numbers speak for themselves. 28% of employees attribute poor communication to project failure. $75M of every $1B spent by an organization is at risk due to ineffective communication. If you run a service business, I am certain, you have found yourself breaking your head over a brief that you couldn't work with, lack of critical information, presence of random variables, ambiguity of goals. The list is endless. This problem affects brand owners too, who often find themselves not getting the desired output from their Agency. or freelancers they work with chalking this off as an inefficiency or lack of ability. Poor communication or a poor development of project brief. could be the culprit here, At Albatrot, we've built a simple yet effective framework that reduces the margin for poor communication, enabling us to understand the problem statement and deliver. Today, we want to share this framework, with you all. As we believe that this will help the community as a whole, the entire framework consists of six parts and each part is designed to answer a very specific set of questions ensuring one gets the brief right. Whether you're a client looking to onboard an agency or an agency looking to work on a new project. This framework will help you find success. 4. The Six Quadrant Framework: The Six Quadrant Framework. When we began this journey, our first instinct was to build on our experience and put down questions that different members of the team believed were important. We then began to populate a questionnaire. with those questions and some that we found across various blogs and videos online, questions, we thought were important or essential to put together an effective client brief. Our list, ended up looking something like this. It was chaos. The natural next step, however, was to try it out. And we shared these questions with our clients, or run through them in a meeting. But our output didn't really improve. Yes we were asking the right questions like I'm sure many of you do. But we will not clear on the specific conclusions we could draw out of the answers that we got from our clients. It still wasn't coming together the way we wanted it to. Finally, after months of tinkering, throwing out unwanted questions combining different questions, putting them in buckets to serve specific requirements. We came up with the Six Quadrant Method. I've always believed that any process, no matter how critical, should be simplified to the best of our ability. The Six Quadrant Method is an outcome of that belief. What you see here is one representation of the Six Quadrants. It's clearly a strong visual representation that I believe would be good for this class. Having said that, imagine you're in a client meeting or taking a brief on video calls. There is absolutely no compulsion to bring our campuses and geometry tools to create this. Even a simple version that looks like this would suffice. Or if you don't even want to draw a circle, Something as simple as this. Remember, the intention is to collect relevant information to help you deliver. That's all. In the following videos, we will go through each one of these Six Quadrant and understand them in detail. 5. Quadrant 1 - Context: Quadrant one, Context, one of the core values at Albatrot is Context. I've always believed that with the right context, your team can be motivated to create magic. We've all been in a situation where we were asked to do work without knowing clearly as to the importance of that task. Conveying that additional background information to your team. Or in this case, getting this additional information from your client is the first and most important step to getting the client brief right. Understand the intention of the work you're about to undertake. Always ask the following questions. The first question I like to ask is, what is the existing problem? Challenge? Let's say the client wants you to work on a campaign for Christmas. The challenge then is not putting together the campaign as much as it is to understand what the campaign is going to set out to achieve. Will the campaign focus on sales and should it start a month sooner to Attract Christmas shoppers. Is the campaign focused on building trust or awareness about the service the client provides. There's a lot you can find out what this question. The second question I like to ask is, why is the undertaking happening now at this time? Now let's continue with the example in the previous slide. You could be sitting in that room six months before Christmas, or alternatively, just a month before. Knowing the reason for the advanced planning or the last ditch effort will give you a lot to work with. The third question I'd like to ask is what would be the outcome if we were not to do this at all. This questions is a tricky one, and I've often seen clients fumble when asked to answer this. Either way, an answer to this question will provide the significance or the insignificance of the task you're about to undertake. It's important to get to the score of what is needed to be able to channel your efforts in the right direction. Depending on the type of service you provide, you can elaborate on the above list of questions to get the context you need. This information goes into the first quadrant. I typically fill them out as bullet points, along with references to where I can find additional reading material on those points. 6. Quadrant 2 - Success Criteria: Quadrant two, Success Criteria. Now that you have some background and context, the foremost thing you need to do is understand the success criteria. What does the client define as success? To find out if the goal is to deliver sales, awareness, or something else. Ask the following questions. The first question I ask is, what are the expected results from the activity? Is it increase in brand recognition, increase in brand awareness, Increase in sales on an improvement in lead quality, the list is endless. Sometimes it can even be a combination of two or more things. Knowing what you are setting out to achieve allows you to plan for that better. The second question I ask is, how will success be measured? Now? While the answer to the first question will Tell you what you need to work towards, the answer to this question will define the exact numbers you need to change. Example, if you're promoting a concert, Success would mean a house full show selling an exact number of tickets. If you're pushing, e-commerce sales, Success would mean a definite ROAS or a total top-line value that needs to be achieved. Knowing how success will be measured, is crucial right at the start. The third question I like to ask is, what is the feeling you want to drive with your consumer? Delivering results is crucial, we all know that. But the results cannot alienate an existing client base. Worse, the results can't come at the expense of devaluing the brand. For example, a brand in the healthcare industry will want to drive trust no matter what the campaign is about. So even if you're doing a public service campaign that allows you to get a little light hearted. The brand may not be okay with that. So it's important to check that in the brief stage itself. As a recap, if you know the absolute numbers you need to deliver on, half of your work is cut out for you. Sometimes, if not, often, you might come across a client who has an idea, knows what they're willing to do creatively, but may not be able to quantify what their Success Criteria, maybe for that activity. Then becomes your job to work with the client and put together these parameters. Reach, awareness, leads, sales, views, brand recall. It could be one or all of these and it's imperative that this criteria is defined at the onset and mutually agreed between the client and you or your team. So you have a clear goal to work. I prefer adding the Success Criteria in the second quarter right next to Context 7. Quadrant 3 - Constraints: There is always a limitation. Agencies that are just starting out often find themselves working with younger brands that work with many restrictions, money, timelines, resources, and lack of data being the chief amongst them. Constraints could also include industry level limitations. For example, it's not legal to market pharmaceutical drugs in many countries. And when getting a brief from a client, it's important to clarify what is and what is not possible. Of course, you need to supplement this with your own research later. At Albatrot, we work closely with an automobile manufacturer. One of their products is a truck that can be highly modified for camping and other outdoor activity. I remember in our early days of the association, we created a beautiful campaign for them, showcasing the possible modifications. Only to find out that we can't do that in the ads we run. Legally, they were required, and are required to advertise the truck as it leaves the showroom. Knowing this information on the onset would have saved us hours of work. Every good client brief comes with Constraints of several kinds. Ask the following questions to shed light on them. The first question I'd like to ask is, what can we not do? I shared an example of the automobile brand that we work with. But consider a few more. Is there a particular set of people we can't speak to? Is the target group too narrow specific, are there certain guidelines that we need to follow? Being perceptive in that meeting and understanding what can and can't be done is very essential. The second question that I like to ask is, if there is a budget, money, money, money, there is always a budget, push to find out what that budget is. The third question is, what are the timelines? I'll try and explain this with an example, once we got a brief for mothers day, as you would suspect, we did the mistake of assuming that the campaign would go live on or around Mother's Day and began work with those timelines in mind. almost 45 days before the day the client reached out to tell us that he wants everything in place by the following week. Turns out he wanted to go live with his offers a month before to give customers enough time to take action. Long things shot. Don't assume. Ask for timelines. Always. The fourth question I like to ask is, Are there any resources that can help us achieve our goals? Surprised to see this under Constraints? Well, let me explain. Most clients have been in the business for some time and that time has most probably given them the knowledge and data that can really help steer you clear of the wrong moves. ask for data from past activities, Learnings on what they did and why it didn't work. I've often seen that a few of the bigger brands prefer giving you an open brief to work your magic with. In such cases to if you push hard enough, you will find the Constraints you have to work with. I like to add constraints as close to Success Criteria as possible in the quadrant that I create. This way, I can examine them together when needed. 8. Quadrant 4 - People: Quadrant four, People. Many years ago, years before we adopted this Quadrant Method, we were approached by a client to create a campaign for Christmas. The team worked day and night and put together a heartwarming campaign that we all loved. Then when we presented the final product to the client, we realise that the brand had four levels of approval after the approval from the manager. Long things short, after the 45th edit, our final work product was approved. I wish I was exaggerating and the story I told you was fiction. But it wasn't. Knowing in advance the approval process, we would have approached each stage differently and increased our fees to anticipate the additional costs involved in multiple rounds of changes. We did make a mistake, but we learned from it. While there is no definite way to circumvent such issues, every single time, Asking the right questions is important and can allow you to take measures to manage the situation. People make a system, and it's no different when it comes to brand teams. Brand managers, Brand heads, finance teams, sales teams, and others may be involved to a varying degree. And it's key to understand who you are dealing with. The first question I ask is, who do we need to involve? Are there internal design teams that will work with us? Any external stakeholders who are involved? Anyone within the brand teams, who have a say or who need to be involved at every stage? all pertinent information. The second question is, how many layers of sign-off will be needed to proceed? A simple question, get a simple and straightforward answer and move on. The third question. Who might be a barrier? Now, depending on the meeting, you may want to sugarcoat this one a little. Instead of asking the question as is. You can ask if anyone involved as a veto right? Or if anyone involved doesn't want the project to be approached in this manner. This question is never easy, but knowing an answer can potentially save you hours of wasted effort. The fourth question I like to ask is, who is the final decision-maker? Now, you may think, what will change if we know this? Maybe nothing, but maybe everything. Let me try and explain this with an example. One of the health care clients asked us to work on a brief that we knew sounds a little different from the regular work we do for them. It was as they called a maverick approach. Knowing that the CEO was the final decision-maker, we worked on two approaches, one satisfying the manager and one the CEO. Any guesses which one went forward to execution? Understanding the answers to the above questions will help add invaluable perspective to the task at hand. Though a very crucial step in taking a client brief, I typically find myself adding it in the last section of the Quadrant, I've seen worrying about this issue when thinking creatively about the problem doesn't help. I use it at the end though once everything is in place, as a check 9. Quadrant 5 - Past Learnings: Quadrant five, Past Learnings, user-generated content and creator lead content has become all the rage over the last few years. All Clients want to get in on the game, so to speak. Before that it was Voice Marketing and augmented reality games. At some point, all brands wanted to be on Meta. When clients approach us with any and all problems, they believe in us to help them if and only if we have past experience to show for it. In fact, the success of any agency can only be defined by the work they have done and the experience they bring. We all pride ourselves for that. It's the same with clients. Clients live, breathe, and sleep their brand. They have probably tried multiple ways to market, to push sales, to increase revenue. They know what works. It's important to get their insights and thoughts during the briefing process to that end. If you remember, we touched upon this briefly in quadrant three - Constraints - when we were talking about resources. It's not their first rodeo. Just like it's not yours. Years of experience would have taught them lessons you can build on. So the first question I ask is, What has been tried in the past? Past campaigns, successes and failures should be studied before planning for the future. The second question, is there any data that can help us drive decisions? Get all the data, designs and everything else you can get your hands-on to take the right steps for the new world. The third question, are there any ideas you already have? Clients may sometimes surprise you. I know I've been surprised a few times in my career. Ask your client if they have any ideas that they would like to explore. Even if you disagree, you will get a good understanding of the direction in which that thought process is flowing. Always a good to have. In summary, it's always good to know what work and what failed, and it's prudent to use that to your advantage. I find myself adding this section right next to people. 10. Quadrant 6 - Next Steps: Quadrant six, Next Steps. You've got all the information you need. But what next? Any good meeting for a brief or otherwise, should end with an understanding of the next steps. As the saying goes, Once all is said. But before it's done, Everyone must be aligned to what comes next. So the first question I ask while I'm wrapping up a meeting, who is going to do what? This is especially important for projects that involve more than one partner and or agencies. You may be managing the design, but someone else may be running the ad. You may be doing the digital marketing, but someone else is executing the plans on the ground. The next question I ask, is When will we all meet again to discuss progress. It's a simple question and gives you a very simple answer. The third question is, what is the first thing you'd like to see? Again, a very straightforward question should get you a very straightforward answer. Even if the project is completely managed by you, there may be certain dependencies on the client that you will need to effectively execute. You may need data, images, guidelines, and any other materials that will help you put the plan together. So make sure to ask for those. Chalk out everything in the Quadrant and there will be no confusion later. 11. Conclusion: The beautiful Quadrant you now see in front of you is everything you need to conceptualize and execute on the required brief. I typically make sure the filled out quadrant is projected in the brainstorming room when the team comes together to work on the plan. It's especially helpful when you're struggling to find solutions. Just staring up at the quadrant brings up ideas and thoughts that often lead to fruitful discussions and consequently, great ideas. I hope the above framework can help you the way it has helped us at Albatrot. With this framework we've not only been able to break the barriers of poor communication, but have also become efficient utilizing the time spent with the time. When asked to duck, we duck.