Messaging – Black and White

The world is full of grey. One of marketing’s job is to create messaging that makes it black and white: clear value proposition. This is much harder said than done. How do you know is your messaging is clear, or better said “black and white”? You need to ensure that you have consisent messages across the various communications tools to use to reach customers (web sites, press releases & coverage, sales reps, etc.)

Here are the steps you can use to assess your black and white messaging score:

1) Do you have a positioning statement and supporting messages written down? Minimally you should have a set  (3 to 5) of messages for your corporate brand as well as a set for each product. My experience is many companies are product or corporate focused and do not have both. 10 points if you have corporate messaging written down, 10 points for product.

2) Ask a sampling of your sales reps for the slides they use during a sales call. Review the messaging across the samples. Give yourself 15 points is the messaging is perfectly consistent.

3) Review your web site – is your corporate and product messaging consistent with your positioning? How does your home page align with the “About…” page, how do your product pages support your messaging? Score yourself between 0-25.

4) Re-read the last 10 press releases and coverage. If your core messaging comes through give yourself 2 points for each article or release in which this is true.

5) How does your collateral support your message? Case studies, product brochures, corporate overviews, etc. Perfect alignment scores 20.

Where do you stand?

BTW – This simply enables you to know your messaging consistent and clear, making it unique and effective as a whole other ballgame. This requires effective positionining. See recent post on competitive positioning  on Write That Down.