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Processes and Playbook

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First off, process. There’s a fundamental pattern to creating a smart recommendation about anything, including a great narrative, and it feels familiar to anybody who’s been through it. Projects involving messaging tend to go through four essential phases:

1. Input — Ask the right people the right questions

2. Synthesis — Boil it down to essential insights and options, and workshop the options

3. Scripting and design — Put it all into the right words and images

4. Testing and refinement — Make sure it works in the real world, and improve as needed

Here’s a detailed breakout of each phase and their strategic considerations.

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Input

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First things first—active listening. It’s critical to listen to customers, external influencers, partners, executives, and the people on the front lines of your business getting things done. One of the best ways to gather input is through live interviews, where you can have a meaningful dialogue, spontaneous follow-up questions and serendipitous discovery. And if you need to get a general sense of perceptions from a broader group, surveys are also helpful. 
 
It’s also important to get a signal around what’s going on with competitors. What’s their story? Where and how do they tell it? Where does your offering—and your narrative—differ from theirs? What problem do you solve that they don’t? And what principles and values do you stand for that they don’t? Many companies would like to believe they don’t have any competitors, but that’s not for them to decide. Customers have a funny way of making up their own minds. Sometimes the biggest competitor of all is doing nothing. Looking at your competitive advantage vs. other companies—and vs. inaction—is a useful exercise during the input phase.
 
What’s more, the input phase is a great time to look for those unresolved strategic issues that could impact the success of a marketing program. Are we all on the same page regarding the target market? Are we thinking about our competitive differentiation the same way? What kind of brand promise or customer experience are we prepared to deliver? Are we at risk of over-promising or falling prey to hype?  At the end of the input phase, the ideal deliverable is not only a findings report and some initial recommendations, but an identification of key questions that need to be resolved.

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Synthesis

 

In the synthesis phase, we start to turn initial findings and preliminary ideas into concrete story components and key messages. It’s best done as a co-creative workshop in which the project lead presents a summary of findings, facilitates the resolution of key strategic issues, presents options for how to tell the story, and previews what it all will look like in execution. And as difficult as it can be to schedule a workshop with busy executives, it’s definitely less time-consuming than a Gordian knot of conflicting feedback sent via email.
 
Synthesis is also about creating consensus. It’s about framing choices and getting people to buy in on the final direction—a direction they helped to shape. That takes time. Throwing up a large volume of neatly formatted notes and insights isn’t helpful unless you’re able to synthesize and frame the choices a company has with regards to the story it’s going to tell. So your workshop deck needs to be concise and leave plenty of room for a healthy debate. 
 
There should be debate. If your workshop feels really comfortable, and there’s no tension, and everybody’s in complete agreement the entire time, then something is awry. The creative process is a messy one. Without a healthy, constructive exchange of opposing views, there can be no lasting buy-in. And without that honest discussion and genuine buy-in, people will go off and create their own version of the story by themselves, diluting the main message and killing any chance to break through the white noise.
 
So at the end of the workshop, the ideal deliverable is the resolution of open questions, authentic alignment around the core components of the narrative, and directional feedback on creative execution ideas. What does not happen in the workshop is finalizing the script. That happens separately…

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Scripting and Writing

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Wordsmithing by committee is hellish. People can spend precious time debating the use of a particular word or phrase, and completely miss the underlying concepts and persuasive strategies being deployed. That’s why we don’t do it during the synthesis phase. Instead, we focus on the core concepts, and then we put it into the language of our target audience in the scripting and design phase.
 
We can also script storylines that have more than one beginning, mapped to all the different reasons an audience might care. Maybe they’re motivated by profit, or environmental impact, or fun, or convenience, or… the list goes on. We can start a narrative dozens of different ways. We can even create standalone thought leadership pieces that are focused on an external trend, and weave in our narrative as a subplot. By separating out scripting and design as its own phase, we bring a core narrative and to life across multiple channels and creative iterations.
 
What’s more, during the scripting and design phase, we can lay the groundwork for future content creation and communication by establishing our core design principles. We can establish how we tell our story, visually, verbally and experientially, not just logically. We can craft a creative brief that gets the entire marketing and content creation team on the same page. And we can give marketers solid footing for pushing back on executives, as needed, and staying true to the soul, not just the letter, of the narrative. 

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Testing and Refinement

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This is probably the phase that gets the least attention—at least up front. In our experience, a lot of testing ends up happening in actual execution, which is fine if everybody’s aware of that. But there are all kinds of options for testing messages ahead of time, each with its pros and cons. And one of the biggest cons of all is around social media-based message testing.
 
It’s critical to stay aligned around the strategic impact we want to have on our priority target audience. And without confirmation that social media feedback is actually coming from our target audience, there’s no way to discern static from signal. If, however, a social media-based testing solution is able to confirm that these are in fact the droids we’re looking for, and the target audience is the one generating the feedback, then it’s a winner.
 
Testing messages with industry analysts is also a popular approach with many B2B tech companies. Not every industry analyst is an expert on persuasive messaging or creative marketing. So rather than asking them what they think of a message, it’s better to ask them how they think their clients would react, what trends they think we can play to, how our narrative differs from what they’re hearing from competitors, or what questions our messaging raises in their minds. Those kinds of insights can be invaluable. So again, the trick is to ensure the analyst’s consulting clients are the same people we want to reach.

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