Products and Advertising: Why the Brief Comes Second

Products and advertising work best when the product itself shapes the communication strategy, not the other way around. Too many briefs arrive at the creative stage with the product already treated as a fixed variable, leaving advertising to do work it was never equipped to do.

The relationship between what you sell and how you sell it is more dynamic than most go-to-market plans acknowledge. When the product is genuinely differentiated, advertising amplifies that. When it isn’t, advertising papers over it, and that gap always shows eventually.

Why Most Advertising Briefs Start in the Wrong Place

Early in my career I worked on a pitch where the brief arrived with a fully formed positioning statement, a tone of voice document, and three mandated executional territories. The product itself was mentioned in a single paragraph on page four. We spent two weeks building creative around a set of assumptions that had never been tested against what the product actually did well.

That kind of brief is more common than it should be. The advertising process gets started before anyone has asked the harder questions: what does this product do that a competitor cannot easily replicate, who has a problem that this product solves better than the alternatives, and what does the product experience actually feel like for a new customer?

When those questions go unanswered, advertising fills the gap with category conventions. You end up with work that looks like everything else in the sector because it was built on the same unexamined assumptions everyone else is working from. The brief came second to the format, and the product came last of all.

This is one of the core tensions explored across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, where the relationship between product, positioning, and commercial momentum gets pulled apart in more depth. The product-advertising relationship sits at the centre of that.

What Advertising Can and Cannot Do for a Product

Advertising can accelerate awareness. It can shift perception at scale. It can make a product feel relevant to an audience that hadn’t previously considered it. In the right conditions, it can reframe a category entirely.

What it cannot do is manufacture desire for a product that doesn’t earn it. It cannot close a gap between what the product promises and what it delivers. And it cannot, over the long term, sustain growth for a product that customers try once and don’t come back to.

I spent a stretch of my career overvaluing lower-funnel performance activity. It looked efficient on paper. Cost-per-acquisition was clean, attribution models pointed in the right direction, and the dashboards told a good story. The problem was that much of what performance was being credited for was going to happen anyway. The customer had already decided. The ad was just the last thing they clicked before completing a purchase they’d mentally committed to days earlier.

That realisation changed how I think about the relationship between products and advertising. Performance channels are good at capturing intent. They are poor at creating it. If the product is genuinely good and the brand has done the upstream work to build familiarity and preference, performance advertising looks brilliant. If neither of those conditions is true, performance advertising is expensive and its results are fragile.

This is why BCG’s commercial transformation research consistently points to the need for integrated go-to-market thinking rather than channel-by-channel optimisation. Advertising doesn’t operate in isolation from the product. It either reinforces what the product delivers or it creates expectations the product can’t meet.

How Product Lifecycle Changes What Advertising Needs to Do

A product at launch has a different advertising problem than a product in a mature category. This sounds obvious, but the executional implications are frequently ignored.

At launch, the primary job of advertising is to create awareness and establish what the product is for. The audience doesn’t know it exists. They haven’t formed a mental model of it. Advertising has to do the work of category entry and product framing simultaneously. That requires reach, clarity, and enough repetition to make the product feel familiar before the customer is ready to buy.

In a mature category, the advertising problem is different. The audience knows the category exists. They probably have a preferred brand. Advertising now has to give them a reason to switch, or to stay, or to expand their usage. That’s a persuasion problem, not an awareness problem, and it requires a different kind of creative and a different media approach.

In a declining category, advertising faces its hardest brief. You’re trying to sustain relevance for a product the market is moving away from. Sometimes that means repositioning the product for a different audience. Sometimes it means accepting that advertising can slow decline but not reverse it. I’ve sat in rooms where the honest answer was the second one, and nobody wanted to say it.

Understanding market penetration dynamics matters here. Whether your growth is coming from new customers entering the category, existing customers switching from competitors, or your current customers buying more frequently shapes what advertising needs to say and where it needs to appear.

The Product Experience Is Part of the Advertising System

There’s a version of marketing thinking that treats advertising as a pipeline: you create awareness, you drive consideration, you convert, and then the product takes over. That model made more sense when the customer experience was linear and word of mouth was slow.

It doesn’t hold up anymore. The product experience feeds back into the advertising system in real time. A customer who has a poor first experience doesn’t just churn quietly. They share it. They leave reviews. They tell people. The social proof layer that surrounds every product now means the product experience is effectively part of the advertising, whether you planned it that way or not.

I think about this in terms of a clothes shop analogy. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who browses the rail. The act of trying on the product does a large portion of the selling. Advertising got them into the shop. The product experience closes the deal. But if the fit is wrong, if the quality doesn’t match the price point, if the product doesn’t deliver on what the advertising implied, the customer walks out and they don’t come back. The advertising spend is wasted, and worse, it has created a disappointed customer who now has a story to tell.

This is why the strongest go-to-market strategies treat the product and its communication as a single system. The advertising sets expectations. The product either validates or undermines them. When they’re aligned, you get compounding returns. When they’re misaligned, you get churn that no amount of retargeting will fix.

When Advertising Reveals Product Problems

One of the more useful things advertising can do is surface product problems early. When a campaign underperforms, the instinct is usually to interrogate the creative, the targeting, or the media mix. Those are legitimate places to look. But sometimes the advertising is fine and the product is the problem.

I ran a campaign for a client in a competitive B2C category where the click-through rates were strong and the cost-per-click was below benchmark. The conversion rate was the problem. People were arriving at the product page and leaving. We spent three weeks optimising the landing page before someone finally went and looked at the product reviews. The product had a consistent complaint across multiple review platforms that we hadn’t factored into the brief. The advertising was doing its job. The product wasn’t.

That experience reinforced something I now treat as a standing rule: before you brief advertising, look at what existing customers say about the product. Not the marketing team’s version of the value proposition. What customers actually say, in their own words, when they’re not being prompted by a survey. That language is often more useful than anything a creative brief produces.

Understanding why go-to-market execution feels harder than it used to is partly about this. The feedback loops between product and market are faster and more visible than they were ten years ago. Advertising can no longer operate upstream of the product conversation. They’re running simultaneously.

Matching Advertising Investment to Product Readiness

There’s a commercial question that doesn’t get asked often enough before advertising budgets are set: is the product ready for the demand that advertising will create?

I’ve seen this go wrong in both directions. An under-resourced product team that can’t handle the volume a campaign generates, leading to poor customer experience at exactly the moment when first impressions matter most. And a well-resourced product that was held back by conservative advertising investment that never gave the product enough exposure to build momentum.

The first scenario is more common in fast-growth environments where the pressure to scale is high and the operational infrastructure hasn’t kept pace. You can read about the tension between speed and readiness in BCG’s work on scaling agile organisations, which applies equally to scaling go-to-market activity. Moving fast without the underlying systems in place creates problems that are expensive to fix after the fact.

The second scenario, under-investing in advertising for a product that deserves more exposure, is a different kind of failure. It tends to happen in organisations where marketing is treated as a cost rather than an investment, or where the connection between advertising spend and commercial outcome hasn’t been made clearly enough to justify the budget.

Both failures share a common root: the advertising investment decision was made without a clear view of what the product needed to succeed at each stage of its development.

How to Write a Brief That Starts With the Product

A product-led brief doesn’t mean the creative team disappears into a product specification document. It means the brief is grounded in what the product genuinely does well, who it does it for, and what the customer needs to believe before they’ll try it.

That sounds straightforward. In practice it requires discipline, because the temptation is always to start with the brand story or the campaign concept rather than with the product reality. I’ve been in Guinness brainstorms, I’ve worked on product launches across thirty industries, and the briefs that produce the strongest work are always the ones where someone has done the hard thinking about the product before the creative conversation starts.

A few questions worth answering before the brief is written:

What does this product do that a competitor cannot easily copy? If the answer is nothing, that’s important to know. It means advertising has to work harder on emotional territory or brand associations rather than product claims, and the creative brief needs to reflect that.

Who has already bought this product and why? The language real customers use to describe what they value is often more specific and more credible than anything developed in a strategy workshop. It also tends to reveal the actual purchase driver rather than the assumed one.

What does the customer need to believe before they’ll buy? This is the single most useful question a brief can answer. It focuses the creative on the belief gap rather than on the features of the product, which is where most advertising gets lost.

What does the product experience feel like in the first thirty days? If the product has a strong first-use experience, advertising should be designed to get people to that point. If the product takes time to deliver its value, advertising needs to manage expectations so customers don’t give up before they get there.

The Brands That Get This Right

The brands that compound over time are the ones where the product and the advertising feel like they were made for each other. Not because the advertising is beautifully produced, though it often is, but because the advertising is saying something true about the product and the product is delivering on what the advertising implies.

That alignment is harder to achieve than it looks. It requires the product team and the marketing team to be working from the same understanding of what the product is for and who it’s for. It requires advertising to be honest about what the product does rather than aspirational about what the brand wants to be. And it requires the organisation to be willing to hear when the product isn’t ready for the advertising it’s being given.

When I judged the Effie Awards, the entries that stood out weren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets or the most elaborate creative. They were the ones where you could see a clear line between the product truth, the communication strategy, and the commercial result. That line is what separates advertising that builds from advertising that burns through budget without leaving anything behind.

Thinking about how to build that kind of integrated approach sits within the broader territory of go-to-market and growth strategy, where the decisions about product, audience, and investment all need to be made in the right sequence to produce results that compound rather than ones that simply look good in a quarterly review.

A Note on New Products Versus Established Ones

New products and established products have different advertising problems, and conflating them is a common source of wasted spend.

A new product needs advertising to do heavy lifting on category education and product awareness. The audience doesn’t know the product exists. They haven’t formed a view of it. Advertising has to create the mental availability that makes the product retrievable when the customer is ready to buy. That takes time, repetition, and reach. It is not efficient in the short term. It is essential in the medium term.

An established product in a competitive category needs advertising to maintain salience and defend against erosion. The audience knows the product. They may have bought it before. The risk isn’t obscurity, it’s irrelevance. Advertising here is about staying present in the category conversation, reinforcing the reasons to stay loyal, and occasionally giving lapsed customers a reason to come back.

The tools and approaches that work for one scenario are often poorly suited to the other. Growth tools and tactics that work well for new product discovery can feel intrusive or unnecessary for an established brand with high recall. The product stage determines the advertising brief, not the other way around.

What This Means for How You Allocate Budget

Budget allocation between brand advertising and performance advertising is one of the most contested conversations in marketing. The honest answer is that the right split depends on the product, the category, the competitive context, and the stage of growth. Anyone who gives you a universal ratio is selling a framework, not answering your question.

What I can say from experience is that organisations which chronically under-invest in brand advertising tend to find themselves increasingly dependent on performance channels to sustain volume. That dependency is expensive. It makes growth fragile because it is contingent on continued spend rather than built on accumulated brand equity. And it creates a situation where the business is essentially renting customers rather than building a base of people who choose the product because they prefer it.

The product has a role in this too. A product with strong organic word of mouth, high repeat purchase rates, and genuine differentiation can sustain more of its growth through earned channels and brand reputation. A product in a commoditised category with low switching costs needs to work harder through paid channels to maintain share. Neither situation is permanent. Both require an honest assessment of where the product actually sits rather than where the marketing team would like it to sit.

Creators and social proof are increasingly part of this equation. Go-to-market strategies built around creator partnerships can be particularly effective for new products that need authentic demonstration rather than polished advertising. The product experience becomes the content. That only works if the product is good enough to demonstrate honestly.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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