Where’s the Brief?
We like to talk about “the brief” as those instructions we get from a client that tell us what we’re designing: its value to the consumer, what features it needs to be successful, whatever regulatory constraints we’ll be working under, etc. But the reality is we rarely, if ever, get anything so neatly packaged, and more often than not, we don’t really get any real direction at all beyond a generic description of the product.
I had a conversation with a former product manager at Adidas, and he described the level of briefs they were used to generating for shoe designers: pages of description of the consumer; pictures and videos that described the context of use; manufacturing goals and constraints. I’ve never seen anything close to that from any of our clients, though the other day I did see, for the first time, a brief that included a list of target emotional advantages of a to-be-designed product, in addition to the functional targets. It stuck out as the exception that proved the rule: too often, companies don’t know who they’re selling to, nor why.
I don’t expect every client to come in with a buttoned up design-oriented brief; especially in the case of small technology-driven companies, developing a picture of the consumer is a big part of the sevice my company provides anyway. But for larger companies, what’s going on? How can any corporation expect to appeal to a consumer they know nothing about?
I suppose if you’re shotgunning the market–putting out every product you can think of, hoping one of them is a hit–you don’t really need to know. As long as that hit is big enough to support all the failures, that is. And how often does that really happen?
Question for you: do you really know who is supposed to be buying your product, and why?
