This week, I am mostly writing a book. Not the great british novel (which would require me to be far more tortured than I actually am), but a book about creative process. More specifically a book about creative process in the commercial environment, about managing creative businesses, and the specific challenges which exist when creativity and commerce collide.
Knee deep in research, I find myself right at the start of the creative process, wondering whether for many creative businesses, this is where it all begins to go wrong. The problem is with the creative brief. Or rather, not getting the right creative brief. The question is, whose responsibility is it anyway?
I have pretty strong feelings on the subject. Its easy to assume that’s it’s the responsibility of the client to produce a comprehensive brief and the job of the creative to respond to it. But that’s making an awful lot of assumptions, the biggest and most dangerous being the belief that the client always understands how to communicate what he or she really wants. The business model based on the vague hope that the client always knows what they are looking for and is able to communicate that effectively to you is seriously flawed. How much more successful you can be if you spend that bit of extra time asking the right questions, establishing the exact desired outcome for the work is easily proved. Just try it some time.
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