Defining Your Real Enemy with a Responsive Brief

In financial services, you don’t lose customers to better brands. You lose them to inertia.

It’s not the competitor who wins the day. It’s the back button. It’s the half-finished form. It’s the customer who decided to think about it later and never came back.

That’s the real enemy. And if you don’t name it clearly at the start, you’ll end up building work that doesn’t beat it.

That’s why we draft a Responsive Brief when start work with our Clients – and in that we always define the customer’s enemy. Not the category enemy. Not the brand competitor. The psychological enemy. The friction. The hesitation. The why-not-now. This is one of the ways we stay ruthlessly customer-centric.

Too often, Client Briefs are filled with bullet points about features, positioning statements, internal goals. That’s not strategy. That’s a list of facts. And in commoditized spaces like credit cards, insurance, or checking, facts don’t drive action. Relevance does. And that’s why we write Responsive Briefs when we are handed a Brief from a Client. If we know that enemy upfront, the work can be designed to disarm it, not ignore it.

Here’s what we recommend:

Start with a customer truth, not a brand truth.
We conducted our own national research study to better understand the mindset of financial services target customers. What we found was telling: 98% of consumers don’t want to try new financial products. That’s not apathy. That’s risk-aversion, fatigue, skepticism—take your pick.

A Responsive Brief uncovers what people need to hear—and that’s not just the product value proposition.
That shift changes everything. It gives you a shot at relevance. A chance to say the thing that actually moves someone to act. Merely marketing product value props gets you a forgettable campaign and keeps your brand showing up as just-any-other-commoditized product.

Keep the Brief brutally focused.
One of the first things we ask Clients is: “What would success look like?” Then we exclude anything that doesn’t help get there from the Responsive Brief. When your Brief is built to chase five different KPIs, you’ll hit none. Make a choice.

Call out the enemy. Literally.
In our Responsive Briefs, we always define the target audience’s enemy. Sometimes the enemy is the burden of navigating the complex world of commoditized financial services because everything looks the same. Sometimes it’s customer cynicism. In financial services, sometimes it’s just fear. 

Once you name the enemy, everything else in the Brief and the work that follows has a purpose. Your tone has a job. Your value prop has a mission. And your creative isn’t just clever—it’s strategic.

Want to beat indifference? Create Responsive Briefs to ruthlessly clarify the goal, zero in on the friction, and make sure your work is kicking the enemy to the curb.