Our brand is tiny. No agency, no designer on retainer. Every time I saw a competitor's poster that was crushing it, I'd screenshot it, write a 3-page brief for a freelancer, wait 4 days, and get back something that looked nothing like it.
So I started building my own process. I'd study the competitor ad obsessively, every colour, every prop, every text block, the lighting - write it all down, and use that as a brief to recreate it with my own product swapped in.
Here's what the input/output looks like when I follow this process properly:
The left is the competitor ad. The middle is just my product photo. The right is what comes out.
Is anyone else doing something like this? Or am I overcomplicating what's actually a pretty standard workflow for small brand marketing?
