Developing a concise message to deliver your target community can be much more difficult than it might seem.
Obviously, in our mediamindshare “formula” …
concise message + clearly defined community + most appropriate platform + timely delivery → media mindshare
… any message you wish to communicate will vary according to the profile of your target community, market, industry or profession and how you hone that message will also depend in large part on the impact you’re hoping it will have within the community.
Simple, right? Wrong! 
And, the reason it is not easy from the outset to come up with a concise message — nor clearly define your community, for that matter — is owing to the “human factor” that comes into play within any organization.
In our experience, two phenomena in particular tend to surface whenever trying to develop a message and tailor it to a community: One, we’ll call the “forest for the trees” syndrome; the second, a “stakeholder” issue, involving sometimes friendly and sometimes openly hostile competition among project participants over who controls the gist of the message … and to what end!
Can’t see the forest for the trees – virtually everyone knows this expression, meaning that one focuses so much on the small details that they cannot see the larger picture. Most individuals in any organization, and sometimes the most informed at fairly senior executive levels, will at some point become so close to their product or service or “mission” statement as a result of having examined it over and over in granular detail that they are convinced they understand completely the exact nature of the messaging they need to deliver to their market.
In developing a concise message designed to stand out as a strong “signal” among all the other communications “noise” being pushed at any given community by competing concerns, your role is to shine a light on some of the assumptions being made as to the nature of the message.
For example, you can’t just take for granted that the generally accepted USP (unique selling proposition) of the product, service or the organization is not out of date in the light of current market realities, including what the competition is doing, new trends and technologies, etc.
If you’re expecting your message to elicit a positive response from the community or market, you’ve also got to be pretty certain as to what kind of message is most likely to elicit that positive response and ensure you highlight the most appropriate benefits to the community.
Avoid at all costs generating a laundry list of all aspects or benefits of the product or service, regardless of the pressure to include everything in your messaging, including the proverbial kitchen sink. The pressure to come up with such an exhaustive list can result from …
Competition among project stakeholders – let’s face it, individuals with different roles within an organization understandably tend to see projects from distinct perspectives. This can be a real “positive” in terms of tapping into a broader range of talents and experience that will make the project a success. But, these same individuals may well bring with their expertise a range of personal, professional or organizationally turf-related interests that compel them to favor a message emphasizing one aspect of the project over another, very possibly to the detriment of the communications initiative and even the organization as a whole.
There is nothing in our experience that can “gum up” the process of honing a concise message quite like competition from different egos or departments within an organization. What begins as a simple communications strategy meeting or conference call, which may have representatives present from marketing, sales, corporate comms and, let’s say, the engineering department, can quickly devolve into an unproductive session for all.
The marketer wants to “spin” the benefits of the product or service to the maximum; the sales rep has to face the customer and while they want to make numbers, they also don’t want to promise too much and not be able to deliver, generating a customer dissatisfaction issue; the engineer knows precisely what the product can and can’t do and wants to qualify every sentence and phrase to match the technical parameters; the corp comms executive has an entire department to get back to managing and just wants to deliver that “press release” that everyone is clamoring for and get them off his or her back!
It may sound like “Mission Impossible,” but the role of communicator in this scenario is to guide these stakeholders through a non-confrontational process that gives each of them as much of the precise messaging they feel is needed from their perspectives, while not muddling the higher-level messaging with too many details, essentially “burying the lead,” as they say in the news media.
Keep stressing “concise” and keep circling back to the higher-level messaging and you will more than likely succeed. It may take multiple meetings and conference calls — our record has been seven separate conference calls resulting in 17 drafts of a press release for one Fortune 500 organization — but in the end, it will have been well worth the effort.
Elements of ‘media mindshare’:
● Why some strategies work … and others don’t!
● Concise message …
● Clearly defined community …
