Every touch point a customer or prospect has with your company shapes their view of you. A clear brand message across the entire buyer journey ensures that everyone is pulling in the same direction, telling the same story and creating consistent touch points for your customers. But … consumers would not care if 82% of brands disappeared.
Entrepreneurs often struggle to come up with really strong messages to describe what they are selling. A common tendency is to describe the product and its features. But people don’t care what you do – they care why you do it and what you can do for them. So it should come as no surprise that buyers usually don’t respond to the product/feature-centric message.
Early stage companies consistently struggle with a lack of impact on investors, customers and employees. You can have well-designed customer journeys, massive resources to get that message out. But if you keep pushing the wrong message throughout your sales funnel, you are doing nothing…
So how do you design the right message?
In the process of discovering the message, entrepreneurs often suffer from i) being too close to their story and forgetting how much work it takes for a new person to understand it; ii) not having met enough buyers to know which buyer segment is their best target and what messages resonate with that particular segment; and iii) keeping the message unchanged as they try to cross the chasm.
To overcome this, you need to get out of the building. It takes hard work to set up customer discovery meetings. But this is where you can add critical value at little cost.
So how do you craft the message?
Start with your positioning statement: Your positioning statement and competitive claim should be no more than a two-sentence formula! Your job is to take the complicated and make it simple. Take the simple and make it compelling. Make it the ‘One Simple Thing’ (‘OST’) as Mike Troiano) and David Skok (http://bit.ly/2DCizD9) call it.
So how do you create the One Simple Thing?
Step 1: Gather data Gather all the data you can about who you are as a business. Make a list of five to ten ideas for each of the following areas Capabilities – what do we really do, our skills, our strengths Customers – who pays us and why, how will we sell to them Context – how do we define our market, what is the state of the market Culture – what do people celebrate; e.g. ‘to succeed here you have to be…’ Competition – who is it, why will we win/lose?
Step 2: Identify your fundamental drivers Select the top three items for each of the five dimensions. Then distil all this information into an emotional and a rational phrase that answers these questions: If you wanted someone to associate your company with a single idea, what would be the rational idea? If you wanted someone to associate your company with a single idea, what would be the emotional response?
Step 3: Create a word space Based on the answers to the two questions above, what words or phrases capture the essence of these fundamental drivers? Then rank them against these attributes: Is your OST true to your organisation’s capabilities and culture? Is your OST relevant to the target audience you have defined? Is your OST motivating – does it change the way your target audience thinks, feels or acts? Is your OST different from those of your competitors?
Source: Mike Troiano
Your One Simple Thing may not be something you communicate to the outside world. Instead, you may need customers to experience your brand and ultimately come to that conclusion for themselves. It may feel like selling yourself short. Just remember that the goal is to prioritise your core ideas and simplify your message so that it’s easily consumable and draws people in to hear the rest of your story. In these clips, Mike Troiano explains this approach in more detail.
https://youtu.be/xg5Arl4nChc, https://youtu.be/qKvdeVfd7Ho, https://youtu.be/vuWrH4IquIE
Defining your positioning statement
With the One Simple Thing in hand – thoroughly developed, committed to by the team – you can define your positioning statement as follows
For [target], who are [segment], [brand] provides the [category] with [distinction] because of [proof].
Target: The group of buyers you are targeting, who you can identify, target and communicate with.
Segment: Within your target, which segment is most likely to buy? It is essential that you are as specific as possible here.
Brand: Your company name (or equivalent brand).
Category: People need a way to understand what you do compared to other products they know. So give them a category that they understand.
Differentiation: Within this category, why are you better? What can only you do for your customer?
Proof: How can you prove your claim?
How you shape the message must change
Many message designs are based on the traditional adoption lifecycle – a smooth bell curve of customers moving from Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards. But as Moore taught us (Crossing the Chasm, read the cheat sheet here: http://bit.ly/2b13PjB), there are cracks – changes in needs – between each stage of the cycle where the same messages used in the previous stage will not be adopted.
Your One Simple Thing may not be something you communicate to the outside world. Instead, you may need customers to experience your brand and ultimately come to that conclusion for themselves. This may feel like selling yourself short. Just remember that the goal is to prioritise your core ideas and simplify your message so that it’s easily consumable and draws people in to hear the rest of your story. In these clips, Mike Troiano explains this approach in more detail.
https://youtu.be/xg5Arl4nChc, https://youtu.be/qKvdeVfd7Ho, https://youtu.be/vuWrH4IquIE
Defining your positioning statement
With the One Simple Thing in hand – thoroughly developed, committed to by the team – you can define your positioning statement as follows
For [target], who are [segment], [brand] provides the [category] with [distinction] because of [proof].
Target: The group of buyers you are targeting, who you can identify, target and communicate with.
Segment: Within your target, which segment is most likely to buy? It is essential that you are as specific as possible here.
Brand: Your company name (or equivalent brand).
Category: People need a way to understand what you do compared to other products they know. So give them a category that they understand.
Differentiation: Within this category, why are you better? What can only you do for your customer?
Proof: How can you prove your claim?
How you shape the message must change
Many message designs are based on the traditional adoption lifecycle – a smooth bell curve of customers moving from Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards. But as Moore taught us (Crossing the Chasm, read the cheat sheet here: http://bit.ly/2b13PjB), there are cracks – changes in needs – between each stage of the cycle where the same messages used in the previous stage cannot be adopted.
| Early adopters | Early majority |
| Visionaries who are driven by a ‘dream’ about a business goal | Pragmatists who care about product quality, infrastructure of supporting products, and reliability |
| Communicate your idea, not your stuff | Get to the heart of the benefits it will bring to their lives. Reference other pragmatists |
So while discovering your why may be your true north, how you shape your One Simple Thing and positioning statement must change as you make your strategic shifts – especially as you try to cross the chasm.