What Is Brand Messaging? And What Happens After You Create It?

Brand messaging is the core ideas and language a business uses to communicate what it offers, why it matters, and what it wants people to understand about the brand. It creates the foundation for how the business talks about itself and how others come to know it.

Figuring out what that messaging should be is something I learned the hard way.

During a recent talk with a group of college students, I shared the story about my first failed television job interview and how it ended up laying the foundation for how I approach brand messaging.

I was in my early twenties and trying desperately to get my first break in television. For as long as I could remember, I'd told people I wanted to tell stories about real people, except there wasn't really a platform for that yet. Then nonfiction television came along. I wanted in. So, when I finally landed an interview for a research position on a documentary series, a lot was riding on it.

The interview was going well and then the producer asked me a random hypothetical question. He wanted to know how I would go about researching a story about weather conditions during a tornado. I immediately started answering.

He stopped me and announced that I wasn't getting the job. He was very nice about it and explained that before I started researching anything, I should have asked questions like What did they want to know about tornadoes? What specific story were they trying to tell? What did they want the audience to understand?

I'd been so busy trying to prove I could do the research that I never stopped to make sure I understood the assignment.

I never made that mistake again.

What Is Brand Messaging?

Brand messaging doesn't begin with figuring out what you want to say. It begins with understanding the assignment. For a brand, that means understanding the business, the audience it's trying to reach, and most importantly, why what the business provides matters to those people.

I used an example from a tech company I've been working with to demonstrate the type of questions I ask. What mattered most to the company? What did they believe they provided that others didn't? What did they want their audience to understand about them?

Then we looked at the other side. What was happening in the audience's world? What frustrated them? What were they worried about? What did they want that they weren't getting? What was really at stake for them?

Somewhere in the answers to those questions, the story became clearer. Once we understood what mattered to the business, what mattered to the audience, and where those things connected, we could begin developing the brand messaging.

Brand Messaging vs. Brand Communication

Then, one of the students asked me a brilliant question. "Is brand messaging the same as brand communication?"

I answered, "No, but they're connected."

Brand communication is how the messaging makes its way out into the world.

That can happen through advertising, a website, or social media, but it also happens every time someone inside the company represents the brand. A salesperson talking to a potential customer. A CEO giving an interview. Someone answering the phone.

You can give everyone the same messaging and talking points, but that doesn't mean they'll communicate it the same way.

My work with the tech company didn't end when the messaging was finished. I worked with the entire team on how to communicate it, not by teaching them a script, but by helping them understand the thinking behind it. They needed to know why the words mattered so they could communicate the brand naturally in their own voices without changing the story.

How People Experience Your Brand

But there's one more piece of the brand story that I wanted the students to think about: how people experience it.

Television taught me early on that you can't control how an audience will react. We could create a moment we thought was hilarious and viewers wouldn't laugh. We could believe we'd given them someone to root for, and they'd root for somebody else.

We couldn't control their reaction, but we could make choices intended to influence it. The stories we chose, the way we edited them, the music we used, and even the order in which we revealed information all affected how the audience experienced what they were watching.

A brand works the same way.

You can't control exactly how someone will experience your business, but you can make choices that influence that experience. If your messaging says you make something easy, but your website is confusing, the experience isn't easy. If you say you care about your customers, but they can't reach anyone when they need help, that's not the experience they're having.

Every interaction either supports the story you're telling or works against it.

Brand messaging and brand communication aren't the same thing. Messaging establishes what you want people to understand. Communication is how that understanding makes its way into the world. And that's where you find out whether the story you're telling matches the experience people are having.

If it doesn’t, it’s time to figure out where that disconnect lives.