Before you brief anyone on branding for a development or a hospitality brand, you need clarity on three things: who you're actually speaking to, what feeling you want them to leave with, and what makes this specific project different from the one down the road. Without that, even the best designer is guessing, and you end up paying twice — once for work that misses, and again for the fix.
The first question — who you're actually speaking to — needs to go further than a demographic. "Professionals aged 30–45" tells a designer almost nothing useful. What they're actually trying to escape, aspire to, or avoid tells them everything. A buyer choosing a development because they want fewer decisions to make in their life is a different brief than one choosing it because they want to feel like they've made it. Same age bracket, same postcode budget, completely different brand.
The second — what feeling you want them to leave with — is where most briefs default to words that don't mean anything on their own: premium, luxury, boutique, considered. Every developer and every hotel says these words. They're not wrong, they're just not specific enough to design against. The useful version of this question isn't "what adjective do we want," it's "what would someone say to a friend the next day about how this made them feel." That sentence is a much sharper brief than any mood board.
The third — what's actually different about this project — is the one people are most tempted to answer aspirationally rather than honestly. If the honest answer is "not much, we're competing mainly on price and location," that's still useful information; it tells the brand to work harder on feeling rather than claiming a differentiation that isn't there. Pretending a difference exists when it doesn't is how you end up with branding that makes promises the product can't back up — which a buyer or guest will notice within the first five minutes on site.
Answer those three questions in a sentence each before the first meeting, and the brief writes most of itself. Skip them, and no amount of design talent in the room will make up for it.