One element that makes a great brief truly exceptional: It has a firm grasp on the culture in which it exists. We call this having cultural fluency.

If you truly want to understand your target consumers and develop better marketing plans, you need to stop thinking about them as an “audience” or a “market segment.” Instead, think about them as the people they are in their everyday lives—as customers.

While the CDJ is a simple model, it's one of the most useful for understanding how we make decisions. It lays out how buyers move from one stage to another during the decision-making process, and it provides marketers with two critical insights that you can use to improve their marketing.