Hi, this is Chris Halliwell back after a long break off the Technology Marketing Center Leaders' Blog rotation, kicking off an early Summer discussion on high tech messaging issues.
Over the last couple of years I've been involved in a few team efforts to craft and deliver messages that convey both the worthiness and the competitive differentiation of a product or service. I'm not a messaging maven, but I do get enlisted from time to time as part of competitive strategy development and execution. I absolutely do have biases around what I believe makes a message effective, and have posted here before about what types of messaging tactics are needed to take and maintain market leadership.
Messaging is often a high visibility team task in technology companies, from start-ups with broadly applicable radical new technology to mega technology players with complex organizations, complex channels, and many competitors. In fact, I've seen some very large technology companies employ virtual armies of marketing communicators and consultants across proliferating product lines in a sort of Dilbertian message creation extravaganza, the ultimate effectiveness of which I doubt -- message architectures, statements, 30-word messages, 500-word messages, and so on. Anyway, technology messaging is a big deal.
Maybe it's just news to me because decades of technology marketing has turned me into a nerd, but lately I've begun to think that all this focus on messaging is missing a big, important element: the medium. What I hear in messaging meetings is that we need to do an ad so we need a message. We need to do the graphics for the trade show so we need a message. We need to write a whitepaper, or data sheet, or put something on the web, so we need messages. I'm thinking of media in a reverse, and maybe more strategic way, by asking the question: what medium is best suited to communicate which messages?
In the next few posts I'll try to lay out context for when/why messaging really matters, how messaging connects to competitive strategy, and where the so called "value proposition" or the competitive positioning statement fits in the overall messaging framework. With that foundation down, I'll put out some ideas on message-to-media matching for you to consider....and, of course, please do, comment upon.
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