Strategic Messaging with Jeffrey Pease of Message Mechanics

Marketing Growth Conversations with Michael Fasciano

Is a long, boring brand message stunting your growth? Jeffrey Pease is an expert in cutting your brand messaging down to grow your business up. He founded Message Mechanics to help businesses simplify their positioning to drive growth. His marketing career kicked off in top firms like Business Objects acquired by SAP and Oracle, where he created the Oracle messaging team. He went on to become CMO of Metadata Solutions and AvePoint. Today, Jeffrey helps companies from startups to Fortune 100 simplify their story to drive growth.

In conversation with Jeffrey, we touch on the intensified need for messaging amidst change, the value of distilling complexity (particularly in the world of technology and business), and how telling a succinct story as an aspiring musician was an early lesson for becoming a messaging pro.

Explore additional highlights from the discussion below.

• There are a number of reasons why a company might realize it’s time to revamp their positioning and messaging. Some are challenges, like market disruptions. There are also very positive reasons, such as growth, new lines of business or products.
• As companies grow and become more multifaceted, a hierarchy of messaging is typically needed, around both overall brand value proposition, as well as across product-level messaging with multiple buying groups.
• Jeffrey’s inspiration for great marketing leadership is Dave Kellogg’s maxim that “marketing exists to make selling easier.” Clarity and simplicity of story plays a huge role in that view of marketing as a driver of growth.
• Jeffrey’s early-career foray into songwriting, during which an A&R executive only got 40 seconds into a demo, taught Jeffrey the value of storytelling compression, emotional hooks and nailing the attention-grabbing start to any story.
• Brands and marketers don’t control the buyer’s journey. Buyer’s control their journeys. A critical job of the marketing profession is to secure customer interest sufficiently so that prospects and customers want to take the next step in learning about your brand and offerings.
• Great messaging leaders are able to develop scalable structures and methodologies, and teach ways of working to other team members who are expert in specific domains.
• Domain experts, who often become Product Marketers, typically have significant depth of knowledge in their respective spaces, but find it hard to cut the detail down to a short, sharp story that gives them permission to have longer, more in-depth discussions with a potential buyer.
• The messaging matrix structure is essential to delivering sharpness in commercial storytelling. Constraints are critical to the messaging process because they force choices that organizations and teams may have hesitated to commit to, for various reasons that range from complexity to politics. Getting to a one sentence value proposition, three points of differentiation, each with three powerful reasons-to-believe forces those choices to be made. Staying within these structures doesn’t mean it’s all you’ll ever say, but doing so clarifies the most important parts of the story that your brand leads with.
• Best marketing advice: “cut it down.”

Pod and article originally published here.

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