Why campaign briefs need a behavioural objective, not just a marketing one

A campaign brief with 'increase brand awareness' as its objective gives a creative team almost nothing to work with. Everyone nods in the kickoff. Nobody knows what needs to actually change in the people who will see the campaign.

That is the problem with marketing objectives: they describe a desired outcome without specifying the behaviour that must produce it. And behaviour is the only thing a campaign can actually influence.

At Livewall, we see this pattern constantly. The briefs that produce the best work are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most ambitious KPIs. They are the briefs that answer one concrete behavioural question: what do we want people to do, change, or do differently after contact with this campaign?

The difference between a marketing and a behavioural objective

A marketing objective sounds like: 'We want consumers to perceive our brand as innovative.' A behavioural objective sounds like: 'We want consumers who encounter our campaign to do one thing with our brand that they would not have done otherwise.'

The second is more concrete, more measurable, and far more useful as a creative brief. It forces you to think about participation marketing in the most literal sense: what does someone actually do as a result of this campaign?

This distinction has direct consequences for how you design the campaign. Once you know which behaviour you want to trigger, you can work backwards to the right mechanism. Do you want people to repeat a purchase? That requires something different from getting them to bring a friend, or getting them to learn something about your product.

The mistake most briefs make is treating the mechanism as a given ('we will run a competition') without first deciding which behaviour that mechanism is supposed to drive.

Five questions every campaign brief should answer

We have reviewed dozens of campaign briefs over the years. The best ones answer five questions that marketing briefs rarely ask:

1. What does the audience do now, and what do you want them to do instead? Not what they think or feel, but what they concretely do. A brief that cannot answer this is not yet finished.

2. What is the biggest barrier stopping that behaviour from happening? Is it a lack of awareness? A lack of motivation? A lack of opportunity? Each barrier calls for a different mechanism.

3. Which single moment in the customer journey do you want to influence? Campaigns that try to move everything at once move nothing. The most effective activations pick one moment and go deep on it.

4. How will you know whether the behaviour changed? If you cannot measure it, you have a wish, not a behavioural objective. Participation, return visits, referrals, purchases: choose a behavioural metric.

5. What should the experience leave behind? Not which message you are delivering, but which feeling or association you want someone to carry after participating. That feeling drives the creative concept.

Why this is harder than it sounds

Writing a behavioural objective sounds straightforward. In practice, it is difficult work. It requires stepping back from the campaign mechanisms you already have in mind and being honest about what you do not yet know.

Many briefs are written around an assumed solution. 'We will build a gamified activation' appears in the brief before anyone has decided which behaviour that activation is meant to produce. That is the wrong order.

At Livewall, we always start with the behavioural question. Our interactive campaigns are designed from a concrete behavioural goal outwards. The mechanism, the format, and the technology follow from that, not the other way around.

The same applies to the gamified activations we build. Gamification only works when the mechanic is matched to the behaviour you are trying to change. Adding a game element to a campaign that has no clear behavioural objective will produce engaging metrics and very little actual change.

Rewriting the brief

In practice, this means removing one sentence from every brief: 'The goal of this campaign is to increase brand awareness among audience X.'

Replace it with: 'The goal of this campaign is for X% of audience Y to [specific behaviour], which they would not have done without this campaign.'

Filling in that last part is sometimes uncomfortable. It forces you to ask questions you would rather avoid: do you actually know why people are not doing that behaviour right now? And are you sure a campaign is the right intervention, rather than something in the product, the price, or the distribution?

But that discomfort is exactly what good campaign briefs produce. They force you to be sharp. And sharpness is the difference between work that changes something and work that only looks good in a presentation.

The campaigns we are most proud of at Livewall, including HEMA Stapelgek and the Wehkamp Wanna Have Days, all started with one simple but precise question: what do we want people to do? Everything that followed, the concept, the mechanic, the technology, flowed from the answer to that question.