Secrets to a stronger message

Have you ever languished in one of those endless strategic planning meetings designed to hash out your organization's core values statement? Or the marketing pow-wows aimed at defining your key messages? You know the ones. Those meetings where you can just feel the life being sucked out of you.

Maybe it's just me? My experience is that many of these well-meaning marketing-focused efforts end up being a waste of valuable time, energy and brainpower.

Before you stop reading and click away, hear me out.

In too many marketing settings, message- and value-focused meetings are missing the key ingredient: a healthy dose of reality. A little walking of our talk. Social media strategist Amber Naslund has a great post over at her Altitude Branding blog on this topic (you can see my comments near the bottom). Amber lays out what a lot of people are still trying to figure out about social media: the message minus the experience doesn't work.

But really, this is no social media problem. It's been around for years. This is the crux of why marketing has a bad rap in some circles. It's why a lot folks equate "public relations" with "spin". The message-- no matter how clever or how well crafted-- will never be enough if it's not real to the people you're trying to communicate it to. By real I mean that they understand what you're telling them because it syncs with their own experience of your business.

Bear with me for a minute, but I believe public relations is really about relating to and communicating to your public and that marketing is having a conversation with your customers about what makes your business relevant to them. If it's not true, if you can't deliver on the promise, it has no place in your messaging.

What's the solution?

Think about this for a minute. What is your company's tagline? Was creating it an internal exercise, or did your customers figure into the process? And your list of core values? Are they a wish list of all those things we hold up as important (quality, service, integrity... you know the list). Or is this really how we operate the business? How do we live this stuff every day?

These are hard questions to ask, and I've sat in plenty of message strategy meetings where no one wanted to ask them. Yet if we ignore the reality of delivering on and exemplifying our key messages, we might as well save ourselves all some time, money and brainpower and not spend so much of our time writing them down and spreading them around.

The alternatives are not so complex. Ask the questions. Dissect the answers. Walk a half a mile in your customers' moccasins. Wonder if they will believe you. When the answer is yes (versus, how can we sell this?), you are headed down the right track.