Comet Branding - Branding | PR | Social Media

Brand Messaging Is Not One Size Fits All

A few years back my wife and I watched our nephews Colin and Noah for an afternoon. They are cousins and close in age and as expected they ran around our apartment and had a good time. Also as expected a tussle ensued. I called the boys over and said; “Now guys, a great way to stay out of trouble is to strategically avoid maliciously aggravating each other, which can incite frustration and lead to aggression.” They both looked at me with matching looks of bewilderment….

….I realized my messaging platform did not resonate with my target audience. So, I said, “If you don’t like getting into trouble, stop bugging each other constantly. At some point one of you will get mad and smack the other.” Their eyes light up and they nodded. Message received.

For a business of any size, shape or tenure it is very important to use brand-driven strategic stories and messaging platforms that appropriately position the company, its products and mission. This messaging will live on your website, in public relations and even in the sales process.

Messaging platforms must speak to your target market in ways that resonate in their world, not necessarily yours. To do this effectively, you may need to push yourself out of the comfort zone of what you know. You have to think like someone else, and not only like you.

If you need to communicate with a technology supervisor, work to understand that person’s world and find out what he or she knows and pays attention to. If you need to speak to CEOs, learn about what matters most to them and understand the thought process they use when making decisions. If you understand their world, your messaging may need to evolve, but in the end, it will resonate with them to a greater degree.

There are times when this can be tough, because you may need to buck industry habits and go against the crowd to shift to this way of thinking, but it could make the difference between getting a meeting with IT department or the CEO for your salesperson or whether or not a story gets placed by your PR team. Developing messaging that resonates can be as easy as “anchor and twist.”

Dan Heath and Chip Heath write a recurring column for Fast Company magazine and they introduced the “anchor and twist” strategy in the July 2008 issue as a way to help explain innovative ideas. They state, “Explanations require lots of attention, but attention is scarce…anchor in what people already know.”

To make their point they share an example of a company that uses laser technology to heat and burst the pigment in your iris to permanently change eye color. Seems kind of scary or at least odd. So, the company anchored their brand messaging to LASIK – a process people already know. The company’s messaging now explains that their process “is LASIK for eye color.” That’s the twist part.

Maybe your company has a strategic solution that can help maximize results from a business process by increasing efficiencies. You could anchor your messaging in the known and respected process of strategic supply chain management, which helps increase back-end efficiencies to drive down costs that impact the bottom-line. The twist comes in when you point it to the area of their business that your solution will help.

Making sure your brand messaging platform and communications efforts speak to your target market in ways that resonate in their world, whether they are five-year-olds or CEOs, can make the difference between being understood and getting ignored.

Tags: Brand Messaging, branding, PR