How do you get to creative, consistent and differentiated messaging?

You asked exactly the right question as the best messaging is all three (consistent, creative, and differentiated). Getting there isn’t easy. I try to break it down step by step. I start with differentiated. What’s different about us that’s valuable to our customer? Then creative: how do we express this in a creative way? Finally, consistency: now that we’ve figured out a creative way to express our differentiated message, let’s make sure it’s the same everywhere and everyone in our company can ...Read More

I do believe in having a north star to help guide all your messaging. Having a clear brand and positioning DNA which is the overarching narrative for your entire company, will help ensure there’s consistent messaging across the entire business and that all positioning is helping tell your company's bigger purpose and mission. Your company’s messaging DNA should be the foundation from which you build your product positioning. You can use your brand DNA foundation as a north star to guide your fea ...Read More

Yes - I think there are 3 things you need for good messaging: A clear understanding of who you're targeting. The target persona, not the vendor is the "hero" in your story. Product marketers too often make their product or company the main character. A clear understanding of how your product is differentiated. What are the 3 - 5 specific things that you do differently from competitive/existing solutions. A compelling brand/company vision. What is your broad POV on the market? How is it different ...Read More

We have our brand messaging and corporate messaging which ties to our company purpose and we use it as our north star and map all related messaging to that. It’s important to work in an integrated way so that messaging is consistent and aligned across the company and the products we sell.We spend a lot of time creating our Messaging Template - a source document our PMM team uses and that we send to all cross-functional partners so they can create content and copy aligned with our messaging. Once ...Read More

To build consistency, it's critical that everyone in the company believes and uses the brand positioning and mission. For example, at Instawork, our CEO walks through it at every all-hands and uses a recent customer example to highlight how we've delivered (or failed to deliver) on our value prop. It also informs our plans, so what we build aligns with the overall company promise. Where we can differentiate is how we message to a particular audience. Being a labor marketplace, we work with both ...Read More

Answer one: Iterate, iterate, iterate. Answer two: Yes, brand positioning and product positioning are inextricably tied.  A statement that sounds bold but shouldn't be: Product marketing should drive brand positioning. It's the why of what we do, it stems from the problems we're solving, and builds on the uniquie approach you're taking to solving the problem. Brand positoining also resonates down and drives how we build what we build, how we interact with customers, and how our product (and our ...Read More

Yes, I believe in tieing positioning up to overall company positioning. The way I've described it before to other team members is it's a scaffold -- the foundation is the company positioning and messaging, and stemming from that is platform positioning and messaging, and then product positioning and messaging. These all should latter up to the overall company positioning. As with everything, there are caveats -- if you're a part of a company that is making a huge shift, or entering a completley ...Read More

Depends largely on how long the company has been in business and how many products it has in market. Brand positioning or purpose are useless if they haven't been validated in the market, and counterproductive if they no loger reflect the future of the company, so be careful relying on them (for a longer, better explanation of all of this, see "Andy Raskin"). As far as product-level messaging, the best approach, in my experience, is to look at it from a problem-stakeholder-incentive angle:  What ...Read More