Before a single agency was briefed, Seafood New Zealand needed a clear strategic foundation: defined audiences, measurable targets, and a CMS brief that gave their internal team genuine control.
The existing website was quietly failing on multiple fronts. Navigation that made no sense to outsiders, an online shop that didn't work, templates that buried content rather than surfacing it, and a tone that no longer matched where the organisation had landed. The organisation serves four very different audiences: the general public, industry and regulators, customers buying product, and media. A one-size-fits-all site was never going to cut it, and any agency coming in without a clear brief would have wasted everyone's time and money.
Before a single agency was briefed, we did the thinking. We built a reverse brief that forced clarity on every major decision upfront: audience architecture, content priorities, CMS requirements, success metrics, and what good actually looked like in measurable terms. We set specific targets — a 20% lift in online shop revenue, a 25% increase in traffic to the careers page — so the brief had teeth, not just intentions.
We defined the technical requirements for a scalable, flexible CMS that the internal team could run without calling a developer every time they wanted to update a page.
Seafood New Zealand went into their RFP process with a document that agencies could actually respond to precisely. The strategic foundation is in place for a platform that serves all four audience groups clearly, fixes the broken functionality, and gives the internal team genuine control over their own content. No bloat, no guesswork, no expensive redos six months after launch.