Brand strategy
Hugo Brooks on Why Brand Communication Needs Insight From the Start
A brand and insight leader explains why campaigns built without the customer in the room become a gamble, and how leaders can turn research into a partner.
Insights Unveiled - Brand Communication
Video from M Seal.
Generated from the canonical interview transcript and validated against source data by Guests on Air.
Why does brand communication fail when insight arrives too late?
Brand communication fails when research is used only to test finished work. By then the customer has had no voice in the idea, and success depends on luck. Hugo Brooks argues that insight should sit beside the client and the creative agency from the first brief, so that great insight and great creativity are built together.
Many business leaders treat research as the final checkpoint before a campaign goes live. The work is finished, the budget is agreed, and the research team is asked to confirm that customers like it. Hugo Brooks believes this habit explains why so much brand communication feels like a gamble rather than a considered business decision.
Hugo Brooks has led a brand consulting business for about 15 years. He came to consumer insight from the creative side, as a brand development specialist who wanted clearer and more useful information about the people he was trying to reach. Insight now makes up most of the work his firm does, so he sees both sides of the argument.
In this interview on a market research podcast, he explains where communication projects go wrong, why research teams are sometimes treated as the enemy, and why the customer is so often missing from the room. His advice is aimed at founders and senior leaders who sign off brand work and want it to land with real people.
Key takeaways
- The most common failure in brand communication is bringing research and insight people in too late to shape the idea.
- Research should be a partner in developing communication, not a testing mechanism used to approve finished work.
- Strong campaigns combine great insight with great creativity, and leaving out the customer turns success into luck.
- Communication is one part of a total brand experience, not a separate bubble that sits apart from the business.
1. Bring the customer into the room early
Asked where communication projects go wrong, Hugo Brooks gives a one sentence answer. Companies bring the research and insight people in too late. By the time they arrive, the strategy has been set, the creative work is drafted, and the only question left is whether customers approve. That leaves research with a narrow job and very little influence.
He describes the usual meeting. The client brings commercial and strategic objectives, and the creative agency brings creativity and media objectives. Someone is still missing, and that someone is the consumer. Without that voice, the business falls back on an old idea: build the brand and the message first, then tell customers what to think.
That attitude, which he sums up as we know best, still runs through many clients and agencies. The more a team works this way, he says, the more success becomes a random process. Some great adverts have been made like that, but in his view they owe more to luck than to judgment, which is a poor bet for any leader.
2. Pair great insight with great creativity
For Hugo Brooks, the answer is a simple combination. Great insight and great creativity, put together, give a business something powerful, and he believes that pairing sits behind many of the best pieces of communication. Everything else around a campaign matters, but those two elements carry the weight when the work has to connect with people.
Today that matters more than ever. Brands are trying to create communication that feels authentic and believable to customers. He points out that it is hard to achieve authenticity for people who were never involved in the process. Bringing their perspective in at the start gives the creative team something real to build on, rather than a verdict at the end.
He uses a well known razor brand as an example. Its long running slogan began to look old fashioned, so the brand later returned with a controversial campaign about what it means to be a good man. Whether people liked it or not, he says, the brand inserted itself into a current narrative, and that move came from real insight into what men were thinking.
3. Treat communication as part of the whole brand
Hugo Brooks is candid about how research teams are sometimes seen. Some client organisations and advertising agencies, especially those stuck in older ways of working, treat the research agency as the enemy. In that view, researchers turn up only to criticise, and the job is to get past them. He calls this a missed chance for genuinely collaborative work.
His alternative is a team in which the client, the creative agency and the insight partner work together. The research partner is there to help everyone do better by bringing in the voice of the person who will actually buy the product. For leaders, that means inviting insight into early conversations rather than using it as a final hurdle.
His closing advice is that communication is an essential part of the brand experience, not a separate bubble where advertising happens. Changes in the media landscape have made that clear. To make the connection work, a business has to understand who its customers are, where they are, what they need and what they do and do not want to hear.
