March 24, 2023
What were you like in school?
I was the type that, today, my former classmates are wondering who photoshopped me into their yearbooks because they have never seen my face or heard my name before. It wasn’t that I didn’t talk to them. I didn’t speak to anyone.
My kid, however, is the exact opposite.
My first grader’s report card came home in his backpack last week. It commented briefly on his academic performance but quickly jumped into his love for being seen and performing. Unfortunately, his favorite time to do both is in the middle of class.
My boy lives to interrupt every conversation he’s ever overheard. Every story he tells is his Most Important Story, seemingly unending and hand-stuffed with so much information that you lose the plot deciding which details are relevant and which he’s thrown in to throw you off.
He is my whole life, but in conversation, I’m often left to ask, “guy, what are we trying to say here?”
* * * *
Last week, I was working with an organization to help them clarify and build consensus around their brand positioning.
They’re an established, 30-year-old company, and when you’ve been around for that many years, the brand has had time to get confusing.
New partners. New growth. More innovation.
It was a collaborative discussion where stakeholders went around the room to share their thoughts, throwing out the words and phrases they felt represented the brand's value today.
The sentences felt heavy.
Too many “oh, and we do this too!”s stapled onto already complex thoughts.
Everything was the most crucial part, placed next to the other most crucial part.
The phrases hitting the table sounded AI-generated or, worse, like keywords for SEO.
Again, I was left to ask, “guys, what are we trying to say here?”
* * * *
Brand development work is tricky because there’s SO MUCH we want people to know that it brings out our worst seven-year-old selves. We rattle off ALL the things we do and ALL the ways we help. We are petrified to leave any one thing on the table.
[if we really knew our audience, we’d know what pieces to pick up and which to put down. But, I digress.]
A well-written brand promise is a strong, emotionally-compelling expression of the value you bring.
Yet, most don’t read that way. Why?
Most brand promises read like they were put together by a committee, using wordy, complex, you’d-never-speak-like-that thoughts that try to sneak just one more thing into our identity.
And once you’ve added one more thing, you add another.
And then another.
Soon, you step back, and your value statement sounds confusingly corporate, unintentionally uninspired, and like someone emptied the contents of their purse on the table to impress you.
If you can’t master your brand promise, the messages you craft around it aren’t going to sound particularly compelling. How do we solve it?
When you want to add, subtract.
The strongest ideas are built through subtraction.
You write down your thoughts and then:
- Subtract what is unnecessary.
- Subtract what complicates.
- Subtract what confuses.
- Subtract what is not unique.
By cutting out the bits that make the message bigger and less precise, you create an opportunity to be more specific. The specificity is power.
The clearer the picture, the stronger the connection, and the more memorable your message.
Subtraction creates messaging hierarchy
Don't kill your darlings because you’ve decided they’re not headline-worthy.
Recast them into secondary roles in your messaging framework.
What differentiates a story that I tell and the one my son delivers?
Messaging hierarchy.
As an adult, I know the five points of a story arc:
- Exposition
- Rising Action
- Climax
- Falling Action
- Resolution
When my son tells a story, EVERYTHING is the most exciting part. When every element is given equal weight, your brain doesn’t know where to focus. So, when the story is over, you’re confused.
The same thing happens when you give your audience a brand promise with 57 commas and 13 semi-colons.
There's no hierarchy.
Your messaging hierarchy - or messaging framework - is the words, phrases, and statements that serve as your brand’s scaffolding. They quite literally hold you up and create a language system for how you talk about yourself. It builds a logical, orderly home for all the different messages and proof points you want to get across.
Your messaging hierarchy may be broken into elements such as your brand promise, positioning statement, value proposition, key messaging, and proof points.
We put them together to build messaging maps that look like this: