Why briefing is different in financial services

Over the years, I’ve seen enough creative briefs from clients in financial services that read like a list of features, benefits and disclaimers, typically rate, term, eligibility and a risk warning. I know why it happens, compliance needs to sign off, Consumer Duty is front of mind, and nobody wants to be the marketer who gets a campaign pulled for a claim they can’t back up. 

But a brief built to get through a Fin proms review isn’t the same thing as a brief built to produce good creative, and most FS teams have quietly let the first one stand in for the second.

You can often see this in the work:

• Ads that explain a product accurately, but say nothing about why anyone would want it. 
• Campaigns that mention every mandatory and communicate with all the warmth of a T&C’s document. 

The result is too many creative teams end up treating the brief as a list of stuff they can’t do or say, rather than a starting point, because that’s mostly what they’ve been handed.

The question that’s usually missing

Ask most FS marketing teams to describe their target customer, and you’ll usually get a demographic profile: age, income band, life stage, maybe a product held elsewhere. This is useful for targeting ad media planning, but for a creative team it’s almost useless because it tells you nothing about how that person actually feels about money.

What is the customer’s relationship with money?

That’s the real gap that needs exploring, are they anxious or confident, or someone who checks their balance daily or avoids looking altogether, someone who sees a mortgage as a milestone or a millstone. Two customers with identical incomes and identical products can have pretty different relationships with money, and they need completely different creative approaches.

This isn’t a soft add-on to the brief, it’s much more than that.  It’s the insight that tells a creative team what tone to strike, what to reassure against, what language will land and what will alienate. Compliance tells you what you can’t say. Having this info means you know what is worth saying.

Why FS briefs skip it

It’s partly a habit and partly a fear. Marketing teams in regulated categories have spent years optimising briefs so they can reduce the risk and also save time in the process, and a question about feelings towards money can look soft next to a quick facts doc or an FCA rule number. It also takes more work and budget. Ideally, you have to talk to real customers, or read complaint data, or sit in on customer service calls, rather than pull a segment definition from a CRM.

But the direction of travel you end up taking makes this question more relevant, not less. Consumer Duty asks firms to evidence that customers understood a product and that it met their needs, not just that the sale was compliant. Doing that becomes easier if your creative is genuinely built around how a customer thinks about money.

What it looks like in practice

The insurance and mortgage work we’ve done at Creode keeps coming back to this. A first-time buyer’s anxiety about affordability requires a completely different creative register from that of an existing homeowner remortgaging for an extension, even if the product and the APR are identical. 

A protection product sold to someone who’s never thought about their own mortality needs different framing from one sold to someone who’s just had a health scare. None of that is in a standard segmentation model. But it could be in the brief if someone bothers to ask the question.

In practice, what you need to do is, before a single feature or mandatory goes on the page, write a line describing how this customer feels about money right now, and what you want them to feel after they see your ad or communication. If nobody in the marketing or product team can answer that, then the brief isn’t ready, it doesn’t matter what else is in there.

Compliance will always shape what the creative can say, and that’s not a challenge that’s going away, and it shouldn’t. But it must be used as a filter, and not as the foundation of the brief starts. 

Start with the relationship with money, and the compliant version of that idea is usually still good work. If you start with the disclaimer, then no amount of compliance sign-off turns it into something anyone wanted to see.