Getting started

A messaging framework is the set of rules formed by your core values and the purpose you want to communicate to your audience or customers. It is all about your customers — it is about the reason why you exist and what value you are providing with your product or service.

A good way to start is by focusing on the problem you are trying to solve and the value the solution can provide to your customers. Why should your customers care about what you are doing? This will help you point your team to a single vision or point of view and you differentiate yourself and stay ahead of the competition.

We will start the post by learning about ​positioning a brand​ and understanding its ​value proposition​ and ​audience​. This will help in forming a ​tagline​ that has a very huge impact on the overall presentation of any brand.

Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is all about figuring out what niche your brand is filling. This defines what makes your brand different from your competitors. You are trying to answer the following questions while defining your brand positioning:

● What are you offering?
● What void does your product or service fill within your industry?
● What benefits does your product or service provide?

Value Proposition

The value proposition is the function and emotional benefits that your product or service provided to the customers. Nowadays there are plenty of options and customers make decisions based on their emotions about a brand. You can have a product with all the best features, but if your brand messaging is not able to communicate the benefits of the product clearly, the customers will move on without even knowing what your product is all about.

The message about the value you are providing needs to be clear and concise. There should be clarity about ​who your product is helping?​ ​What they will be able to do with the product?​ and ​How is the result of using your product?

Being able to communicate your values properly will help you connect with the customers. If the value you can provide with your product or service fits the needs of the right customer, they will be able to connect with the brand emotionally.

“Stay true to your values. That’s why you were a success in the first place, and that’s how you make incredible things happen.”

— Rafe Offer

Understand your audience

The most crucial parts of a messaging framework are the audience, your customers. The more you know them, the better you can design the messaging framework to communicate effectively with your existing customers or target audience.

Understand how your audience make decisions

Dig deeper into the details of your audience to figure out how they are making decisions:

• What is the problem that your product will be able to solve?
• Where will they be when they will require your service?
• How are they solving the problem currently?
• How frequently they need a solution?
• How will they discover your product?

These are some of the fundamental questions that you need to answer before getting started.

Create Brand stories

Brand stories are more like storyboards your customers and their journey to discovering and using your product. Create 3-4 brand stories of different user types and they will act as your ideal users and will guide the team towards prioritizing the right problems to solve.

Figure out the right tone of voice

Create some rules about the tone in which you want your brand to be represented. You can be funny, if you are targeting the younger age group, or you can be serious and professional if your target audience is CEOs of other organizations.

It depends on your audience and the category of the business you are in. The important thing to remember is, you need to stay consistent across all channels of communication, from social media to your support emails.

Having a clearly defined tone will also help your content creators to stay consistent with the core values of the organization. The customers will be able to predict what to expect from any form of communication and that will make them more connected to the brand. They will carry the feeling that they understand the brand and can associate a personality with it.

Listen to your customer

Take note of what your customers are saying about your brand. This is a good place to start if you already have feedback from existing customers. You don’t want a situation where your customers are visualizing the brand differently from your personality of the brand.

Be in sync with the customers’ vision of the brand and take it forward from there. Instead of reinventing the brand, evolve the brand slowly with your customers in mind.

Tagline

A tagline is a summary of your brand, a combination of your brand position and value proposition. Here are some great examples:

Nike — Just do it.
Subway — Eat fresh.
Adidas​ — Impossible is nothing.
Levis​ — Quality never goes out of style.

Your tagline should be targeted towards your customers, should represent your vision and must be conveying what you do. A tagline can be inspiring, motivating or persuading. The main goal is to help the user connect with the brand and make a buying decision to get your product or service.

Bottom line

There are no strict rules on how you should be structuring your messaging framework, so you can mold it the way you want to fit well with the existing process of your organization. Once you have all the information about the things we discussed above and take the following steps:

• Create a team of people from all the domains who are somehow involved in communicating with the customers.
• Brainstorm about the tone and personality of the brand.
• Have a question in place, that you need to ask while deciding the right message to communicate.
• Document everything.
• Keep it centralized, so everyone in the team has access to it.

Introduce your team to the brand messaging framework and let them know the importance of it and how and where it will be used.

It doesn’t kill the creativity of a brand, but provides a theme to your creativity which stays in sync with the brand’s core values. Having a brand messaging framework can change the way you decide on the features of your product to what you communicate on social media. It will take time and a few iterations to find the perfect solution for your brand, but getting started is not very difficult and is definitely worth it.

Ready to start building your brand’s messaging framework?

The Jozi Firecracker Factory are passionate about helping Fortune 500 companies develop messaging frameworks that stay true to your values and resonate with customers. If you’re looking to get started with developing and implementing your own messaging framework, get in touch with our product branding team to find out more about we can help.