As a fellow highly experienced chief marketing officer said to me this past month, “it seems to your investors and board members as if there is a magical, special, and still secret set of words, and one only set, that will somehow elevate and transform the company’s prospects to into wild runaway success.”Good grief – he’s totally right.
How often should messaging change? Ideally almost never. Certainly as infrequently as possible. If you are changing corporate messaging every 3 months, then by definition you don’t have messaging. That means you don’t know your market, how to best sell your product, or understand your customer’s value proposition as they perceive it. A message is repeated consistently over time. Consistency is the keyword. Messaging is a basic part of marketing infrastructure necessary for the executive team, marketing team, employees, partners, and key ecosystem members and our contractors to best represent the company. It guides all parties in the construction of any collateral or website pages (the written word) and the production of videos (the spoken word). Lack of consistency equates to noise, and most of us seek to filter noise out. Messaging deliverables generally includes the top level corporate messages (3 to at very most 5 bullets of text), supporting sub-messages (examples of use), positioning statement, and optionally the “about” statement which is a close proxy for the positioning statement. Product-level messaging is also useful. These are toolsets to guide the most important things you need to say about the company. Standard corporate and product descriptors and other key infrastructure flow from and around the top level messaging.
How can you stop the pain? Set up one or two group sessions to guide a group from senior management in terms of what we need to produce. This is not all of estaff. This should only include 3 or 4 senior management members that have spent time outside of the building and in front of customers on sales calls. The CEO, VP of sales, top salesperson in the company, founder-evangelist, … find those people. The CMO needs to lead the session and gather ideas about the value proposition and what resonates with customers. Then, after a few sessions, the CMO needs to go off and finalize the content and publish it back to management. It won’t be exactly the same as the content in the last meeting session. Let the CMO do their job and finalize it. This is then delivered as a final work product, and communicated to all interested parties. It must get the full support of the board, senior management, and sales leadership.
Despite the goal of consistency, the first set of messaging done for an early start-up is often incorrect. Why? You are not understanding part of your value proposition. Your repeatable, scalable sales model has not emerged. You are not listening to customers and learning. Key analysts present feedback but you have missed it. But don’t confuse necessary tuning in the very short term with and an endless barrage of messaging du jour. Set this expectation up front that this will be reviewed within 3 to 6 months. Make sales calls. Figure it out. But then lock it down.
In silicon valley, for sure, you get just a few iterations to get this right. Darwin is working overtime. That’s it. If you cannot consistently identify and succinctly communicate the upper most thoughts about your value proposition, differentiation and brand, and don’t understand what it should be, then you likely have many other problems and won’t have a scalable business.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/messaging-madness-michael-zuckerman/
