We’re not sure who named it a “brief,” but they sure had a great sense of humor.

Our creative team has seen briefs longer than a CVS receipt or a proud grandmother’s camera roll, and still felt as if they couldn’t quite get inside the audience’s heads.

But that’s how a brief works, right? It’s for everyone—the account team, creatives, production team and clients. It tends to be focused on the offer and specs and, on a great day, solid reasons to believe. It has a very important place in creative development. But even though many teams will read the brief and get moving, we’re likely to ask for more.

Enter the customer journey map

When we’re helping launch a new product or a rebrand, a paragraph on the target’s mindset isn’t enough to help the creative team understand where your audience has been and what they want to know next. We get it. We ask to keep the brief brief. But this is where we want people to ladle on the details.

A journey map provides all of this, through a more temporal, contextual view.

Think about it. If someone is already familiar with your new Petflix app and has browsed your catalog, knowing their demographics will matter far less than knowing what they’ve already experienced, their relationship with the brand so far and what questions may be lingering.

Journey maps shine a light on what briefs tend not to touch, like a target’s emotional state at various touchpoints, competing inputs, decision timing that runs ahead of the consideration phase and how a handoff should feel for the customer.

What’s in our map?

The FATFREE map looks a lot like any other customer journey map, and you’re welcome to take whatever you find helpful from it.

At every stage in the purchase funnel, Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Retention (and you can add Engagement and Advocacy if you like), we want to envision what a customer is feeling, wondering, reading and doing next. What’s gotten them to this point, and what will it take to move them to the next one? Just as important, what’s getting in the way?

You may not need a customer journey map—if

There are times when a brief is absolutely enough.

Campaign extensions. Products that require low-cost/low-consideration decisions. Trade show collateral. If the journey has already been mapped, or there’s no real journey to speak of, the nuts and bolts will do the job.

Skipping the journey map because time is tight or we think we know enough about the audience almost always turns out to be a mistake. The value of those additional insights is likely to make it all worth the effort.

The difference between good and great

Why don’t we simply build a journey map into the brief? Sounds easy enough. However, we believe that separating the inputs is critical. Where the brief considers desired clicks and conversions and what the brand wants, the customer journey map is 100% focused on the buyer.

This singular perspective makes a difference. A strict buyer focus is the line between decent, on-strategy creative that fits the brief and great creative that connects with people and compels them to act.

We’ve seen it in our own work. While creating a learning platform for a client, understanding users mindsets and behavior (what they’d tried in the past and how they felt about it) informed virtually everything in the final product. The colors. The logo. Every word on every page. It all came from an intimate understanding of the people we hoped to attract.

The results have been beyond gratifying. Users love it. The client loves it. And as jaded as this industry can make us sometimes, we love that it’s making a genuine connection.