How to Dramatise the Problem in a Creative Brief

Sometimes a brief is strategically clear but still gives the creative team very little to work with.

You understand the audience. You understand the proposition. You understand what the brand wants people to think or do. But when you start trying to turn it into an idea, everything feels a bit flat.

One useful way to attack that kind of brief is to stop looking at the product for a moment and spend more time on the problem.

What is actually going wrong for the person? What does that look like in real life? Is there a moment, behavior or situation that makes the problem instantly understandable?

That is the basic thinking behind dramatise the problem.

Snickers is probably one of the clearest examples. “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” takes something incredibly ordinary and makes the effect of it the idea. Instead of explaining that hunger changes your mood or performance, the advertising shows someone behaving like a completely different person. The product then becomes the obvious way back.

The technique works because it gives the creative team something tangible to work with. A vague consumer problem becomes a situation you can exaggerate, observe, make funny, make uncomfortable or turn into a piece of behavior.

It does not mean every problem needs to become dramatic in the literal sense. A small everyday annoyance can be enough. The important part is finding the bit people recognize.

If you were working on a banking brief, for example, the interesting thing might not be that customers want “simplicity.” That is just the strategy language. The more useful question is where banking feels unnecessarily complicated in someone’s actual life. Maybe it is splitting a bill, waiting for a payment to clear, moving money between accounts or trying to understand a fee. One of those moments might contain the beginning of the idea.

The same applies to almost any category. If the brief says people do not see enough difference between the products, what does that look like? If they keep putting something off, why? If they do not trust the category, what created that distrust in the first place?

You are looking for the thing underneath the wording of the brief.

The danger is pushing it too far. If the problem is minor and the campaign treats it like a national emergency, the work starts to feel fake. And if the audience ends up looking stupid just so the brand can look clever, that usually does not help either.

The problem still needs to feel true, and the product needs to have a believable role in solving it.

That is why this is useful as a creative technique rather than a formula. It gives you another way into the brief, but it does not tell you what the final idea should be.

In Heista, Dramatise the Problem is one of the Playbooks you can bring into the creative process. You can keep the same brief and change the approach, then see what happens when the thinking starts from the problem rather than the product, benefit or category.

If it opens up something interesting, keep going. If it does not, swap the Playbook and attack the brief another way.

That is really the point.

A good creative technique does not give you the answer.

It helps you find a different question.