I printed a brief on Wednesday, which I do maybe twice a year, because something in it was wrong and I could not find it on a screen. Eleven pages. Four of them category context. A persona named Ambitious Amanda. A stated objective of building awareness while deepening loyalty while entering two new segments, all by June.
Truffles sat on it. Not beside it. On it, centered, within about forty seconds, with the finality of a cat who has assessed an object and classified it as furniture.
She was the first reviewer all week to give me an honest read.
I have been thinking about that since, partly because I now work from a desk in my own apartment instead of a floor full of people whose job description quietly included agreement. I have watched briefs like that one get approved from inside brand strategy rooms for years. Nobody in the room believed it. Everybody in the room nodded.
Every good brand decision is a refusal, and refusal is the one move a room full of people paid to be agreeable will never make.
Truffles refuses constantly, and she does it on three principles I have started stealing.
One, she has a defined audience and it is not everyone. She likes me, she tolerates my sister, and she has never once tried to win over a guest who badly wanted to be won over. She loses those people on purpose. Most brands are still commissioning research on how to appeal to a segment that already told them no.
Two, she cannot be bought with budget. Barnaby got a thirty dollar felted wool toy in July and she has not touched it. She sleeps in the box a pair of boots arrived in. What she responds to is not spend, it is quality of experience, which is why the cheap thing with the right texture beats the expensive thing with the right story every single time.
Three, she is boringly consistent. Four years, same hierarchy of preferences, same reaction to the same stimulus, no repositioning. I have had clients change their brand personality twice in one fiscal year and then ask me why awareness feels soft.
What she responds to is not spend, it is quality of experience, which is why the cheap thing with the right texture beats the expensive thing with the right story every single time.
I rewrote the brief that night. One page, one audience, one thing we want a specific person to believe that she does not believe today. It is a better document, it took ninety minutes, and eleven pages of the old one are still on the office floor because Truffles has not finished with them.