Messaging

Fill in this workbook as you go. Each section has a “Concept review” dropdown underneath it. These explain the concept behind the section, not a rule to follow. Your brand might land somewhere different than the examples show, and that’s fine. Examples throughout use Doughnut Labs, a SaaS company that sells disruptive Doughnut Technology. Delete the grayed example text as you fill each section in.

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Core sections

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1. Value proposition

One sentence, in the reader’s language: what does the brand do, for whom, and why does it beat the alternative? E.g. Doughnut Labs turns the process you’re running in a spreadsheet into something that runs itself, and you can have it live this afternoon.

Concept review: Value proposition

This is the positioning statement translated for someone outside the company. The position is written to be testable and is full of internal vocabulary. The value proposition has to survive being read once, by a distracted person, with no context.What tends to get lost in the translation is the “instead of what” part. A value proposition that describes what the product does, without any signal of what it replaces or improves on, reads as accurate and gives a reader no reason to move. The comparison doesn’t have to be explicit, but it usually has to be implied.It’s also worth separating this from a tagline, which sits in section 3. A value proposition is judged on clarity. A tagline is judged on memorability. Asking one sentence to do both usually costs it the first.

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2. Message pillars

Three is the usual number. Each pillar is a supporting argument for the value proposition, and each needs its own proof.

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Pillar 1

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Pillar 2

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Pillar 3

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Pillar 4 (optional)

Concept review: Message pillars

Pillars exist because one sentence can’t carry a whole argument, and because a brand that says a different thing every campaign never accumulates anything in a buyer’s memory. Repetition across a small set of ideas is what builds recognition; variety across many ideas is what prevents it.The count matters less than the discipline. Three is common because it’s roughly what a team can hold in their heads and what a market can absorb, but the reason to cap it is that an uncapped list stops functioning as a filter. Once there are nine pillars, every idea fits one of them, and the document has stopped saying no to anything.There’s a real tension in the “where it leads” column. Tying each pillar to a destination makes the messaging immediately usable by campaign teams. It can also flatten a brand-level idea into a funnel step. Which risk matters more depends on whether this document is read mostly by strategists or mostly by people shipping ads next week.

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3. The message set

The same idea at four lengths. Each is used in different places, and each should be recognizably the same argument.

Concept review: The message set

These four formats exist because the same argument has to survive very different amounts of room. A press release footer, a conference badge, a sales call, and a homepage subhead each allow a different word count, and a message that only works at one length gets improvised at the others.Improvisation is the actual risk. When there’s no approved 30-second version, five salespeople invent five of them, and the market hears five slightly different companies. Writing each length down once is less about elegance than about removing the need to make it up under pressure.The tagline is the one most likely to be argued about and the least likely to matter on its own. Brands differ enormously in how much weight they put on it, and a memorable tagline attached to a position nobody can state is a decoration. The pillars are what the tagline is compressing, which is why this section sits after them.

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4. Audience variations

Same pillars, different emphasis. One row per audience you address differently.

Concept review: Audience variations

The distinction this section rests on is between varying emphasis and varying substance. Reordering the same three pillars for a different reader keeps one company talking. Giving each audience its own argument produces several companies wearing the same logo, and buyers who talk to each other notice.The “don’t lead with” column often does more work than the one next to it. The same true statement can land completely differently depending on who reads it: a claim that reassures a buyer can read as a threat to whoever would otherwise have owned the decision. Naming that in advance is cheaper than discovering it in a deal.How many audiences belong here is a judgment about cost. Every row is another thing to keep current, and a matrix with twelve audiences tends to go stale in a way one with three doesn’t.

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5. Approved claims

What the brand is allowed to say, and under what conditions. Anything not cleared here needs review before it ships. Who approves a new claim, and how long does it take? E.g. Brand lead approves wording. Anything comparative or numeric also goes to legal. Two working days.

Concept review: Approved claims

A claims list is where messaging meets risk, and it serves two audiences that want different things from it. A writer wants to know quickly whether a sentence is usable. A reviewer wants to know what the sentence is standing on. A single table with a status column and an evidence column answers both without a separate approval thread each time.Claims decay in a specific way that’s easy to miss: the sentence stays the same while the number behind it moves. “4,000 teams” was accurate when someone wrote it, and nothing about the sentence signals that it needs rechecking. Attaching a refresh cadence to the evidence is what catches that.The conditions column is where most of the nuance ends up. Few claims are simply allowed or forbidden, and the interesting cases are the ones that are fine in one context and not in another.

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Optional sections

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A. Objection responses

Concept review: Objection responses

An objection is usually a compressed version of a longer worry, and answering the compressed version tends to miss. “Too simple for us” is rarely a request for a feature list; it’s a prediction about a rebuild in eighteen months.Writing the underlying worry in its own column stops the response from becoming a rebuttal. A rebuttal argues with the sentence the person said. A response addresses the thing that made them say it, which an existing pillar often already covers.

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B. Competitor language

How does the brand talk about named competitors? What’s off-limits? E.g. Doughnut Labs names competitors only on comparison pages, describes what they’re genuinely good at before drawing the contrast, and cites their public pricing verbatim. No claims about competitor performance, reliability, or internal practices.

Concept review: Competitor language

Brands sit at very different points here and several work. Some never name a competitor, on the view that it lends them attention. Others build a whole acquisition channel out of comparison pages and win the buyers who were going to run the comparison anyway.The consideration that cuts across both is that comparative claims carry a different evidentiary burden than claims about yourself. Describing your own product optimistically is ordinary marketing. Describing a competitor’s inaccurately is a different category of problem, and it’s also the version a reader is most likely to check.

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Related resources

• Positioning The strategic claim every message here has to support.
• Brand voice and tone How these messages sound once written.
• Brand strategy concepts Why positioning and messaging are separate documents.
• Copy brief Where a writer pulls the message for a single piece of copy.
• Marketing campaign brief Where a campaign picks which pillar it’s carrying.