"Can it be a bit more... you know. More."
Notes like that are completely normal. So are "it needs to be more blue" and "can it be a bit less Christmas?" And honestly, most notes like these are useful. They just take a phone call to decode.
If you're a brand manager or a producer and you have to sign off on music, you don't need to know what a minor seventh is. But a few habits make the feedback round a lot faster, and the music a lot better.
Say what it should do, not what it should be
"Make it more upbeat" is a solution. "The product shot feels flat" is a problem. Give the composer the problem. There might be five ways to fix it, and only one of them is making it more upbeat. Sometimes the fix is taking music out.
Point at the second
"The middle bit drags" could be anywhere in a 30 second spot. "Around 0:12, when the voice-over starts, the music feels busy" is something I can fix in ten minutes. Timecodes are your best friend. Most studios (us included) send a link where you can leave a note right on the timeline, so use it.
Use references, but say why
Sending a reference track is great. Sending it without a word is a bit of a gamble, because I don't know if you like the tempo, the guitar, the vocal or the fact that it's by an artist your CEO loves. One sentence does it: "the way the drums come in at the chorus".
Also, be careful with the famous ones. Nine out of ten people say Netflix when you ask them for a sonic reference. That ta-dum is great at grabbing a living room's attention. For a museum or a charity it's usually exactly the wrong tone.
Listen where your audience listens
Don't judge a mix on your laptop speakers in a quiet room and then on studio monitors in our room, and compare. Listen on your phone. Listen with the TV on in the background. That's how most people will hear it, and some problems only show up there.
Collect the notes first
This one saves the most time and money. If three people in your team each send their own notes, I get three directions, sometimes contradicting each other, and we lose a round. One combined set of notes, with a decision on the conflicts, is cheaper and gets better work.
And give it a day
The first listen is always a bit weird, especially for something new. Sleep on it. The question that matters isn't "do I love it right now" but "did it stick?" If you catch yourself humming it in the shower the next morning, that tells you more than any meeting.
You don't need the right words. You need to tell me what you feel, and where. I'll take it from there.