The Secret to Brand Messaging

(Spoiler: It’s More Complicated Than Copy)

In a 1964 book called “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,”  communications theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “The medium is the message." This means, roughly, that the method of delivery (print, radio, TV, etc.) is a significant determinant in how a message is perceived or understood. This is true mechanically, for sure. You can and must tell a story in different ways for different media. A radio ad played on TV (or vice versa) would be less effective than the original transmission. You could also argue that shades of specificity and context make a difference. A late-night basic cable TV ad will hit differently than the same ad running during the Super Bowl. These are all considerations focused on message strategy, which is a deeper well than medium selection. 

There's also types of messages, which generally refers to the framing of whatever it is you want to say. Is your message emotional? Is it a flat-out sales pitch, married to the outmoded idea that a unique selling proposition must be front-and-center? Is the message technical and deeply descriptive of features, or is it more narrowed down to benefits? 

The message might be focused on the brand identity more than a specific service or product. Sometimes these kinds of communications are focused on positioning the brand in a category, or, more specifically, drawing distinctions with other competing brands. You can even have a generic message, which communicates or advocates for the category rather than a specific brand.

For example, these messages might talk about or create a psychological or emotional tie to running instead of focusing on a specific make and model of running shoes. The idea here is that runners like to run, and identify as runners. By speaking to that identity the brand can attract runners to their product, the opposite of the hard sell.

Nike’s “Madman” ad, print, 1990 – We cannot see the shoes.

So, the medium matters, as does the strategy, the contact, and the framing of the communications transmission. But none of this speaks to the root of what messaging actually is. The message of a campaign is, in effect, both the big idea behind what you want to say, and the precise language.

Before anything else — before format, medium, strategy, framing, any of it — you have to know what you want to say. And here in the 21st century, what you say is, arguably, more important than ever.

“In an age where every person is now a broadcaster, brand trust is more important than anything else. ”

At various times in the past, you could overcome poor messaging with overwhelming resources. Money still goes a long way, but the past few years have seen many examples of poor messaging amplified with huge resources for a campaign that either didn't work at all or did more harm than good. (see the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad, or maybe the Oatly Super Bowl ad for a more recent example). In an age where every person is now a broadcaster, brand trust is more important than anything else. As a result, what a brand says is of increased importance, and it is especially vital that whatever the brand says be true.

What you want to say, or the story you want to tell, must be informed by a goal. In political campaigns, the goal is to convince someone to vote for you, so the message focuses on giving people good reasons to vote for the candidate. More barbaric and less sophisticated campaigns instead choose to focus on broadcasting reasons to vote against the other candidate, but just like any other ad campaign for any other product, this is often less successful than making the positive case for yourself, your candidate, or your product. Although, it is more successful in politics than any of us should feel comfortable with.

An awareness campaign, as you might guess, is focused on introducing a brand or product to people that might potentially become customers. So, these messages usually combine brand story, background, and product or service benefits into something welcoming and engaging. With digital advertising, this can feel creepy if the message is poorly considered and the campaign focuses instead on selling features to micro-targeted consumers. (As one example of this, I am a three-time survivor of melanoma and I regularly get grim melanoma treatment ads on Twitter, of all platforms. It both bums me out and fills me with disdain for the platform choice, which makes zero strategic sense. The medium is the message, indeed.)

I would argue that the idea of advertising a product alone as a primary message is a poor strategy for everything but infomercials. It works for Flex Tape, where the lens inverts and the pitchman turns a single product into a brand experience. This works far less well for things like cars, spirits, services, shoes, and the like. Anything that needs trust requires more than a features list and a special low price. In 2021, most products and services share trust as a vital component of why and how a person decides to try or buy.

The decision to buy isn't just a random lizard brain thing. In fact, if I may borrow a term from network security pioneer John Kindervag: while a small segment of the buying populace will try new things based on the strength of marketing alone, most consumers now operate in a “zero-trust” environment. No new product or brand begins with anything really resembling the benefit of the doubt. 

We know this because, due to the modern infrastructure of social communications and digital media, brands now gain new customers in an almost epistemological fashion. Much of how we, as consumers, understand the ecosystem of brands and products competing for our attention and money is similar to how we "know" anything at all: a trusted source tells us about their personal experience with the company or product, and we believe it; or, a trusted source tells us they have heard good or bad things from their trusted sources, and we believe them. We trust the opinions of the person or publication we’ve come to trust as a substitute for our own lived experiences prior to having experiences of our own. 

This means that most (if not all) corporate, brand, and product messaging must ideally err on the side of transparency and candor. The end result of doing so means that the messaging is compatible both as a direct line to current customers and as brand identity, contact, and product info that can be transmitted epistemologically, in whole or in part, to a third party.

If a brand lies or ends up sideways by omission on something that ends up becoming A Whole Thing™, the modern structure of knowing a brand — or, functionally, how someone identifies with a brand — is now not just a one-on-one relationship. The brand’s treachery now involves the customer, the brand, and the customer’s trusted source. In this structure, if the brand lies, the brand lies not just to the customer but to the customer's trusted source, as well. This can have a more negative effect than what you might reasonably expect from normal PR challenges. It can easily become a huge drag on the brand identity, as well as the brand’s ability to build a resilient audience.

The takeaway for you, if you came here hoping to learn more about messaging: the message is the core of a communications campaign. It can answer to or serve a number of goals and can be built to suit any strategy and structure. And, in an age where audiences only achieve real value when they are resilient, the message must not only be true, but candid, transparent, and accessible. Ultimately, your message is what you want to say, and how you say it is just as important as the message itself.