Ask any marketing leader whether their company is customer centric. Almost all will say yes. It’s on the values poster. It’s in company meetings. It’s in the job specs.
But look at their briefs. That’s where the truth is.
Because briefs are weak. And they’re weak because nobody is actually doing the work required to understand the customer – they just like to think they are.
Everything in marketing – campaigns, propositions, product launches, media plans, communications – lives or dies on the quality of a brief. A brief is only as strong as your understanding of the person you’re selling to. Not a segment. A human.
We accumulate insight instead of earning it
The pattern is familiar. Research gets commissioned. A deck arrives. It’s thorough, well-structured, and seventy slides long. We skim it, extract the headlines, and move on to the next meeting or email. By the time we’re writing a brief, we’re pulling from memory – which means we’re pulling from assumptions.
The result is insight that looks credible but doesn’t cut. Vague statements about customer needs. Product features dressed up as motivations. Demographics without psychology.
I’ve sat in briefings where a genuine customer tension gets raised – something real, something that actually matters to people’s lives – only for the response to be “let’s make it an AND. We’ll talk to that audience AND our core audience.” Except the media budget doesn’t support both. So instead of doing one thing brilliantly for someone specific, you end up doing two things vaguely. A prime example of a brief getting watered down to please everybody. And work that tries to please everybody moves nobody.
Three things that actually fix this
The marketers who write sharp briefs – the ones that produce genuinely good work – tend to do three things their peers don’t.
- Stop outsourcing understanding and sit in on focus groups yourself. Not to validate what you already think, but to discover what you don’t. The texture isn’t in the formal answers. It’s in the conversation between the questions – the hesitation, the contradiction, the anxiety beneath the surface. At Barclays, sitting in those sessions gave us the context as to why customers behaved the way they did, not just what they did. That’s a different brief entirely.
- Spend time on the frontline. Call centres. Shop floors. Customer service teams. Not to audit them – to listen. At EE, I’d sit alongside call agents and just absorb. They hear the real patterns. They know what customers actually need, what frustrates them, what never shows up on a survey. Most organisations have no mechanism to surface any of it – so go and find the raw intel yourself. It’s there, and nobody’s invoicing you for it. At John Lewis, I went further and worked weekends on the shop floor, whilst keeping my regular week at HQ. What you learn standing next to a customer, watching them hesitate in front of a product, is something no research brief will ever capture.
- Make your segmentation real. Don’t just write personas. Run a small ethnographic study. Bring customers into a room. Watch them with your product. At Audible, we did exactly this – observing how people actually engaged with audiobooks in their daily lives, not how they said they did. When your team can picture a specific, real person – someone they’ve met, someone they understand – the brief changes. You stop designing work at a segment and start designing it for someone. The difference shows up in the work.
Then do the hard bit: edit
Here’s what nobody talks about. Once you’ve done all of this, your job is to throw most of it away.
You have to synthesise everything you’ve learned into one clear point of view. One customer truth. One problem to solve. Not a list of tensions. Not three competing hypotheses in the same document. Not a reel of “considerations”.
This is harder than gathering the insight in the first place. It means making a call on what matters and leaving the rest out. It means the 40-page deck stays in your folder, not the brief. It means being a curator, not a compiler.
But that’s what a brief is. Not a research dump. A point of view, earned through real understanding and sharpened through honest editing.
When you get that right, creative teams have something to work with. Something to push against. And the work that comes back is sharper, braver, and more likely to actually move someone – because it’s rooted in a real human truth, not death by PowerPoint.
Customer centricity isn’t a value. It’s a discipline. And like most disciplines, you can’t outsource it – and you can’t fake it.
Jay Safdar is a growth marketing leader with experience spanning global financial giants, British icons and tech innovators – including AllSaints, Amex, Amazon, Barclays, EE, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Hyperoptic, John Lewis, Lloyds and WEX Inc. Specialising in demand generation, performance marketing and marketing effectiveness, Jay has a proven track record of driving commercial impact through data-led strategy and insight-driven creative.
