In fact, corporate leadership needs to do a lot more than merely understand message development and message delivery: They need to play a direct role in the message development process itself.
At the opening stage of an organization-wide public relations campaign, executives and the PR team must schedule a single-minded, dedicated, message development session. The CEO should model for the rest of the leadership team by personally attending these meetings and playing an active role in them.
Guided by the company’s highest-ranking PR executives or consultants, participants in these sessions should set about devising two related categories of company-specific messages consisting of roughly 3-4 messages each:
Category 1. Industry-facing messages: These are broadly analytical observations about the state of the marketplace, the kinds of new marketplace demand presently on the rise, and the market triggers and demand drivers that are compelling your company to offer its products and/or services in a distinctive way.
Category 2. Corporate-Facing Messages: These constitute a formalized but succinct version of your “elevator speech.” They concisely enumerate your organization’s chief competitive differentiators.
Ideally, each message in both categories should be substantiated by 2-4 “proof points.” Almost all proof points come in any of these forms:
A data pointResearchAn exampleAn award or encomium from an objective, third-party sourceA recent news developmentAn anecdote
Ideally, this twinned set of messages will meld together perfectly. When articulated in tandem, they’ll clearly convey that your company is uniquely equipped to address today’s particular market challenges.
Think of it like this:
“Looking at today’s market dynamics (as expressed in your agreed-upon industry-facing messages), our company’s competitive differentiators (as expressed in your agreed-upon corporate-facing messages) position Company X perfectly for this marketplace moment.”
These messages, especially the Category 2 corporate messages, should take on the character of a mantra or catechism throughout the organization, or at least among company representatives playing a role in marketing. Content deriving from one or both sets of these messages will be expressed, in some way, within virtually every marketing platform deployed by the company.
Message consensus is essential. To tap another religious metaphor, everyone in the choir must be singing from the same hymnal. Messages — and their accompanying proof points — stand at the center of your marketing program. They thus require as complete a buy-in as possible from all top company officials.
Without exaggeration, everyone needs to know them, believe them, internalize them and be prepared to actively promulgate them. Every staff member who speaks about the company in any public setting must be imbued with the two message sets — and be trained in their use. The PR unit should therefore also conduct a media training session for all company spokespeople, including the CEO. This session will show people how to effectively express their messages, how to transition an interview toward your prized message territory and how not to squander opportunities to express your messages.
When a media-trained executive engages in a media interview, there’s an immediate and quantitative way to evaluate the success of the interview: Count how many times the interviewee conveyed messages and proof points. You can literally keep score. While it requires training and practice, it is possible to give an interview and deliver all your messages, bolstered by many proof points.
If a media-trained spokesperson, for example, is giving a five-minute interview and they’ve articulated all but one of the established corporate messages by minute four, the best ones will step on the brakes, interrupt themselves within an answer and say something like, “You know, before we wrap up here, I just want to add one important point…”
Messages, which serve as the foundation of your PR and marketing content, can be long-lasting. But they aren’t permanent. To remain persuasive, messages have to be refreshed periodically to reflect emerging conditions within the market (e.g., public policy changes, economic changes or changes in the regulatory atmosphere) and within the organization (e.g., changes in leadership or a change in services or product lines).
Executive leadership and PR leadership may come to agree that the established messages are not working and require updates or adjustments. If an executive team and a PR team has truly internalized their existing messages, they’ll know when it’s time for a change in messages. They’ll sense it.
What’s the message here? Minus the “proof points,” it is: C-suite executives who play a direct, personal role in message development, who come to internalize their messages and “proof points” and who take part in media training will benefit most from their PR investment.
And so will their companies.
