Before you craft a story you need to design a brief

Another week another IDEO lesson. In this past week’s lesson, we discussed the importance of planning and designing a brief before crafting a story. To begin, Jenn noted that all great ideas begin with a blueprint, and related it to familiar examples like building a house. She said, “Pre planning helps you articulate your story in the best way possible so that you move people”.

The three things to remember when designing a brief are:

1. Who’s your audience?
   Zero in on specifics, the more specific you are the better.
2. What are their needs?
   Empathise with your audience and figure out what is most important to them?
3. What are you trying to change?
   What do you want people to do, what do you want to motivate people towards?

Exercise

Our first exercise was to think of a time we empathised with another person or group of people, we shared personal experiences and Shay shared a time she empathized with a family member.

In last weeks lesson, we decided on our challenge. Which was that we want to tell a story about our organisation so that we can grow the business in line with our core values. In this lesson, we needed to develop a brief. We made sure to keep the three points she mentioned earlier in mind when crafting our brief. As a team we brainstormed, below is the result.

Who’s our audience?

Marketing managers, digital marketing managers, CMO, business owners/CEO, head of digital, head of social

What are their needs?

Make marketing managers look good, innovate, solve problems, meet targets, increase brand awareness, increase market share, increase revenue, they want digital solutions

What are we trying to achieve?

Deliver results for clients, maximise return on investment that share the same values that we do, use creative technology to solve problems, grow our business and the business of our clients (you can’t have one without the other).

By the end of this exercise, we decided we would like to build a customer persona that embodies and reflects the above needs. This will help improve our targeting and the way we tell our story.

Next, it was time to think about the main idea and what we wanted our audience to remember of our story. Jenn told us to focus on one idea. She noted that if we do, our story will be more impactful and meaningful. After some brainstorming, we decided on our idea and medium.

Our Idea

The client is frustrated with cumbersome agencies who don’t share their values and goes in search of a new type of team to accomplish the impossible with.

The Medium

We would use video as it helps us to connect with our audience in a more emotional way.

Reflect

We found being specific a little difficult and making things succinct.