Brand messaging: turning strategy into language people understand

A business can have a clear strategy and still struggle to explain what it does.

The positioning has been agreed. The audience is understood. Everyone seems aligned in the workshop. Then the website needs rewriting.

Marketing talks about innovation. Sales focuses on price. Leadership wants to communicate ambition. The product team has its own explanation, which happens to be considerably more technical.

None of these perspectives is necessarily wrong. But put them together and customers are left to work out what the business actually offers.

What should your brand communicate?

Start with brand positioning and the decisions behind it. What does the business offer? Who is it for? What problem does it solve? Why should someone choose it over the alternatives?

These questions should already have answers before anyone starts writing headlines. Yet businesses often replace them with language they think sounds impressive.

An innovative partner delivering transformative solutions. A forward-thinking organisation committed to excellence. A new standard in whatever category happens to be involved.

None of this tells customers very much.

I prefer starting with a plain explanation of what the business actually does. There's always time to make the language more distinctive once the proposition is clear. If you can't explain the offer in ordinary language, a clever tagline probably isn't going to rescue it.

Establish a messaging hierarchy

Not everything deserves equal attention. Decide what people need to understand first, what supports that message and what can wait until they're ready for more detail.

Core proposition. The central idea explaining what the business offers and why it matters. Someone unfamiliar with the company should understand it without knowing the internal brand strategy.

Key messages. Three or four supporting ideas covering benefits, capabilities or points of differentiation.

Proof points. Evidence supporting those messages: results, product features, relevant experience or explanations of how something works.

Supporting information. Details for someone ready to explore, compare alternatives or decide.

Consider a company providing inventory software to independent retailers. Its central proposition might be: Keep your inventory connected, wherever you sell. Supporting messages could cover visibility across stores, fewer manual updates and better stock decisions.

A homepage might introduce all three. A product page could focus on one in detail. A sales presentation might adjust the order depending on the audience. The wording changes, but the underlying ideas remain connected.

Be specific about the value

Businesses tend to describe themselves using qualities they would like customers to associate with them. Innovative. Reliable. Experienced. Customer-focused.

They're difficult to evaluate without context. If something is simpler, explain what becomes easier. If your advantage is expertise, show the relevant work. If you promise efficiency, identify where customers save time, effort or money.

I've found that useful messages often come from details the business considers too ordinary to mention: direct access to senior specialists, fewer systems to manage or unusually flexible production volumes.

Those details can say more than another paragraph about commitment to excellence. A considered verbal identity then helps determine how those messages should sound in different situations.

Give people reasons to believe you

Imagine a business claiming exceptional customer service. What makes it exceptional? Faster responses? Dedicated support? Greater availability? More authority for employees to resolve problems?

For each key message, document the evidence behind it and where it should appear. Easier to manage might be supported by a product demonstration. Faster implementation might be supported by a documented onboarding process. Specialist expertise might be shown through relevant work and team experience.

If nobody can explain or substantiate a claim, it probably needs another look. I'd also include evidence that challenges the preferred narrative. Lost sales, customer complaints and recurring misunderstandings can reveal weaknesses that a messaging workshop might never uncover.

Adapt messages without changing the proposition

Different audiences care about different aspects of the same offer. A finance director may want costs and returns. An operations manager might focus on implementation. Someone using the product every day wants to know whether their work becomes easier.

They don't need three unrelated brand stories. They need relevant explanations of the same proposition.

A social post has a different job from a proposal. A homepage needs to establish relevance quickly. A product page can explain features and benefits more thoroughly. Consistent messaging doesn't require identical sentences everywhere.

Test the framework against real communication

A messaging framework can look convincing in a presentation and become surprisingly difficult to use once the business starts producing content.

Try writing a homepage headline and introduction, a short company description, a service-page opening and an email to a prospective customer.

I like testing messaging in shorter formats because there's less room to hide behind elaborate explanations. If an offer needs three paragraphs before anyone understands it, something probably needs simplifying.

The website content architecture determines where those messages belong. As Nielsen Norman Group's research on reading online has shown, visitors tend to scan pages rather than read every word.

Make it usable across teams

Include the proposition, supporting messages, evidence, preferred terminology and examples of how people can adapt the language. Note claims the business should avoid, too.

A forty-page document explaining the philosophy behind every sentence is unlikely to help someone writing an urgent customer email. Give teams enough direction to make sensible decisions without asking for approval every time.

Review what people actually understand

Do prospects misunderstand the offer? Do sales teams regularly correct assumptions? Do website visitors struggle to distinguish services? Are customers choosing the business for reasons barely mentioned in its communication?

Some problems need clearer wording. Others may expose gaps in positioning, the offer itself or the information customers need.

I've seen how easily an approved statement can become something everyone inside a business recognises but nobody outside finds particularly useful. The framework should make communication easier for the people using it and understanding easier for the people receiving it.