The approach some companies take in developing marketing messages can seem like managed chaos: throw a bunch of people in a room, jockey for white board positioning and commence mud wrestling as the brainstorming begins.
People from different sides of the company can and should be involved. As with any type of corporate gathering, undercurrents of politics and agendas can taint the process, and where you sit in the food chain and the dynamics of personalities can play roles too.
Discussions about marketing messages inevitably get mixed up with bigger picture product strategy and positioning topics, and the very act of trying to find the right words can be a flash point for disagreement; there’s generally a lot of passion tied up in these things, ideally, anyway.
And then, the messaging stake is put in the ground, the messages are developed, and they sit more or less as is until someone wants to start the messy process all over again.
Just thinking about it for a bit made me think of how outdated this approach to messaging development is – it is insular and just too easy to be tainted by the curse of knowledge – that is people who are too close to the story lose perspective and can’t see it as others do (for more on the curse of knowledge, see Chip and Dan Heath’s great book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Die and Others Thrive and my post Building Better Memes).
I thought about this while reading an article about a client’s technology on a popular gadget blog. We had struggled with key messages leading up to a new campaign, and came up with ones we thought were good. But upon reading the article, I concluded that this blogger had really nailed it, with a fresh and interesting way of describing the tech.
The flip side of marketers losing control of the message is that we can use the crowd as an ally in message development.
Let’s face it, we are all in the attention game. Everyone wants their content and ideas to rise to the top. Although we can’t force people to adopt our messages, we can listen to the crowd – especially the voices that are skilled in the art of writing in ways that get attention – and use what we learrn tio inspire and inform our messaging development efforts.
