Bridging the Gap Between Strategy and Messaging

Messaging is a critical element in the marketing tool box and represents a great opportunity to help your brand reach new customers or reengage existing customers. Unfortunately, messaging is also one of the riskiest and inefficient processes in marketing today: Too often, final messaging to customers ends up being not “on strategy” or, worse, far off the strategy.

In our experience, the reason for this lies in the gap between strategy and execution. More specifically, the gap between brand strategy and creative development.

There are two major reasons. First, brand strategies tend to be big-picture and conceptual (see adjacent example). Messaging, on the other hand, needs to be detailed and specific with proper proof points. It is not easy to jump from one to the other without suffering “lost in translation”.

The second reason lies in differences between the types of people involved in strategy development versus those responsible for messaging development. At the risk of being overly simplistic, the former tend to be left-brain, analytically-oriented people, while the latter tend to be right-brain creative types.

So, how do you bridge the strategy messaging gap?

We have found that the best means to ensure that messages are consistent with the brand strategy requires developing what we call a “messaging blueprint”. The messaging blueprint is a document created by the same team that developed the brand strategy. But unlike the high-level brand strategy, the messaging blueprint details the structure, content and tonality for message development. This blueprint represents a guide that the creative practitioner can use to develop messages that are on strategy.

Messaging Blueprint Components

The messaging blueprint is organized by all key audiences and addresses the messaging needs of each. Keep in mind that a given audience may have multiple message constructs, depending on the number of unique opportunities for that audience. Each messaging construct consists of three core elements:

  1. Message Structure. The message structure is a summary of the message construct. It identifies the primary and secondary ideas. It also defines the type of the message (e.g., testimonial, problem-solution or analogy), the tonality of the message (e.g., objective, authoritative or fun/entertaining, etc) and the source of the support points. Going back to our example of the information services company, here is the messaging structure for one of the message constructs:
  2. Message Content. The message content is comprehensive but unrefined and notes the problem or business issue (stated in terms of the target audience, potential solutions, and the method in which the message should be delivered. It represents the ideal starting point for true creative message development.
  3. Message Support. This section details the different elements that can be used as proof points in final message development. Message support includes, but is not limited to, things like data and statistics, charts, process descriptions, quality control measures, customer quotes, expert testimonials, market success measures and a long list of other potential items. What is appropriate to a given message construct depends most on the target audience, the sector and the primary/secondary messages. Going back to our example earlier, shown below is an example of a message construct:

The purpose of messaging (and marketing communications in general) is to help make the strategy successful. Developing a messaging blueprint will bridge the gap between strategy and execution and ensure clarity, define priorities, and identify best methods through which to communicate your brand.

It will prevent you from creating ineffectual or even embarrassing communications, it will provide you with a guide for evaluating whether messaging is “on strategy” and it will lower the costs for developing messaging by minimizing the need to test and refine proposed messages.

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