AMA: Rate Director of Product Marketing, Lindsay (Saran) Gatta on Messaging

Here's how I like to approach these complex product categories: 1) Identify if your product is a B2B2C or B2C2B category 2) Identify the functional and emotional benefits your product has for both audiences 3) Connect your macro value prop to both audiences by leaning into where there are shared benefits (from step above) 4) Connect your macro product benefits to both audiences by learning into where there are shared benefits 5) Differentiate benefit statements and product reason to believe statements in audience-specific assets and channels

This is certainly not revolutionary but I think of ChatGPT as my editor. If I believe a positioning statement could be stronger or punchier, I ask it to provide me stronger alternatives. Or if I need synonym inspiration, I ask for a list of them. All of the things I used to ask Google for (like "What's an alternative word for empowered?") are things I now have ported over to ChatGPT.

This is a great resource from the Product Marketing Alliance: https://www.productmarketingalliance.com/your-guide-to-messaging/#what-is-a-product-marketing-messaging-framework And so is this from Reforge: https://www.reforge.com/artifacts/c/marketing/messaging-framework

Is your company comfortable with sharing the vision of where the product will eventually land and the stage-gates to get there? If they are, this type of thought leadership can distinguish your company for corporate audiences and press, especially if it is a differentiating product. This is an area where I think it is important to be transparent and honest about what hasn't been figured out yet but instead acknowledge the types of questions you are working to answer. This approach will also rally internal audiences to better understand your medium to long-term product strategy. Win-win.

Establish a RACI framework for your stakeholders (R: Responsible, A: Accountable, C: Consulted, I: Inform) and a timeline to factor in review times for those POCs. Share those timelines along with their role so they expect to hear from you. When you reach out to them for their review/approval, remind them of the turnaround time they have, the role they play in the stakeholder review process and what the next steps are. I love getting signatures with dates from stakeholders as well - it makes the sign-off more official. You can create a table with all of this info at the top of your messaging doc so it is transparent to all parties.

This is a great question and I don't think there is one right way to do it :) I would probably do BOTH. Be bold for your overall value prop statement - lean into the fact that you are category leading. And then I would back up your value statements with reasons to believe from the product in areas where they already have a mental model/anchor. So for example, no consumer is likely to have a mental model/anchor for different types of GPT models (3.0, 3.5, 4.0), BUT they do understand the difference between a third grade teacher and a physical professor's knowledge. Metaphors and analogies go a long way to make new categories seem more relatable.

IMHO, the best way to do that is through a unique competitive, consumer or industry insight -- if no other company is leaning into that type of insight, you will be novel and differentiated. You can also try validating how differentiated your messaging is through customer testing -- they will tell you if they have heard what you are trying to say or not before.

IMHO, the best way to do that is through a unique competitive, consumer or industry insight -- if no other company is leaning into that type of insight, you will be novel and differentiated. You can also try validating how differentiated your messaging is through customer testing -- they will tell you if they have heard what you are trying to say or not before.

I like to use the Care-Do-Impact framework for materials like this. So why should the customer care, what should do they do about it, what is the expected impact they should have if they take the recommended action. That will help the sellers make this case study more action-oriented too. So with the materials you have, think about leading with the strongest customer quote. And closing with the strongest stat. You can always do an additional appendix with the secondary quotes and stats to show it works across multiple customer segments. Another idea is to make 1 template and then scale it out for your top industries or customer segments. It appears you have a lot of material to work with so instead of cramming it all into one single two-pager, how can you get legs out of your assets AND make them more usable for your sellers?

Back when I was on the Chromebooks team, customers really unpacked the nuances between "powerful," "simple," and "simplicity" for us, via qual research. For example, "simple" had a negative connotation to it whereas "simplicity" had a more positive connotation to it. This really helped us update our positioning, messaging and taglines as we learned the way we were communicating simplicity was undermining our product at the time.

I love following Occam's Razor for tips and tricks on storytelling: https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/