I endeavour to cover the four "Cs" of Company, Category, Consumers, and Culture in most of my projects, particularly when my client is becoming acquainted with a brand through new business prospecting, or when they are running a competitive review. My projects for strategists tend to focus on consumers and culture.
For simplicity, the deliverables are in a text format, either in email or Word or pdf document, with links either to external sources or to sources stored on my Dropbox account. Of course I can work with other formats e.g. PowerPoint if I'm to present directly to clients.
Below, I outline the topics that I consider including in most projects. This is followed by examples of questions that have either appeared within a brief, or which illustrate the direction taken in a response to a brief.
Company + Category
- Description of the brand and the product or service
- What the advertiser says about its brand
- How the brand has performed against its competitors
- Legislative, health, international factors that have affected sector conditions
- New product innovations
- Causes of disruption in the sector; winners and losers
- Movement in market share amongst competitors
- The marketing of the brand and its competitors, and examples of innovative marketing
Examples
- What lessons can be learned from the brand's overseas activities?
- Is there contradiction between the advertiser's / brand's mission statement and its activities?
- Is the brand's premium positioning working?
- Why are its online sales declining?
- What are the reasons for the change in packaging formats?
- Why are traditional brewers struggling against craft producers?
Consumers
- Identity of target audience: demographics, how they think, their priorities, motivations etc
- The target audience's relationship with the brand
- Media behaviour
- How the audience has driven trends within the sector
Examples
- How is our nation brand perceived as a destination by people in the UK and USA?
- Have consumers fallen out of love with chocolate?
- Is the product consumed at home or on trade?
- Are the brand's ethics likely to foster loyalty amongst this audience?
- Why are consumers choosing premium and craft beers?
- How is athleisure reaching into business attire?
- How the move toward experiences is having an impact on clothing sales
- Is impulse the most important motivator in the retailer's footfall?
- Do women in the north of the UK have different attitudes towards beauty than women in the south?
- Why is personalisation now so important to our target audience?
Culture
- The relevance of macro trends to the brand, and any potential opportunities that arise from them. Examples of macro trends:
- The value of Big Data, the ethics associated with it, and consumer reactions
- Consumer empowerment: activism and scepticism; turning the tables on brands who have to work harder as consumer loyalty becomes harder to achieve.
- The expectation of transparency
- The prioritisation of sustainability as the world, and its resources, shrink.
- The ideal of simplicity becomes more attractive as life becomes noisier
- Drivers of change within the sector
- Cultural factors likely to affect the brand
- Cultural cues: semiotics / brand platforms. Current behaviours and emerging trends that illustrate brand ideas
Examples
- Will veganism become a dominant factor in food service now that young people are driving this trend into the mainstream?
- What are the opportunities offered by the observation that Millennials have no DIY or gardening experience?
- How will the cocooning trend evolve and will it offer advantages to brands usually associated with socialising outside the home?
- Why are strong flavours linked to healthier eating and drinking?
- Health has changed how we indulge: where are the strong niches for indulgent brands?
- Where are the new touchpoints for digital detox in leisure and travel?
- What do high net worth individuals look for in travel, now that their previous priority of "experiential" has become mainstream?
- What are the various ways that people are coming together to form communities (for coffee brand)
- What are convincing ways that freshness is being conveyed and how do people understand the concept?
- How is passion represented in popular culture?
- Can Britishness be described in a way that does not resort to stereotypes?