Lifting marketing ROI is top of mind these days in Corporate America, and reducing redundant costs is one key way to help achieve this goal. When applied to messaging, this means not having to start at square one with each new project.

Here are a couple of tools that can reveal whether your brand messaging is in a state of order or chaos:  Take an inventory of the messaging points you use in every communication vehicle in your current marcom portfolio. Everything from brochures to banner ads, PR, web copy, print ads, signage, broadcast scripts, even your company email signature line. Is the language and phrasing consistent? Are you seeing messaging consistency by audience? Or is your messaging all over the place? If messaging chaos is your reality, think about the impact that could be having on your brand equity.

Then poll ten internal stakeholders, from the stockroom to the boardroom. Ask them what your brand stands for. Do the same keywords and phrases keep coming up? Or not so much? Repeat your poll with ten customers.

Now step back and look at the picture that’s emerging from these exercises. Does it resemble a painting in the modern art wing, the kind that everyone interprets differently (or perhaps they just shrug and say, “I don’t get it.”)? If so, you may need to do another exercise to realign your brand. And there’s a new tool for that. It’s designed for the job and affordable for even the smallest organizations.

Message Mapper 2.0  from 9align (https://www.9align.com), is the only web-based tool that helps you perform a message alignment exercise in the most effective way possible. This streamlined version of the original web-based tool helps organizations develop powerful brand messaging and keep it consistent throughout all stakeholder groups, media channels, and marketing projects.  It culls best practices from the best-of-breed branding experts and presents it in an easy-to-use, wizard-driven path, with plenty of room left for creative expression.

Message Mapper helps brand managers and marketers identify, organize, prioritize and communicate compelling stories that project a difference to their audiences. It provides a flexible, yet stable platform of messages that can be used by marketing staff, their agencies, freelances and other vendors. Instead of beginning each project having to first figure out the benefit or copywriting angle, Message Mapper helps you side-step this part of this process. It presents a centralized messaging roadmap on a single page, shared by everyone, so no one ever starts from a blank page again. And because it’s web-based, Message Mapper provides a centralized governance aspect to brand messaging to keep it consistent and under control throughout even the most volatile organizational or environmental shifts. That protects the brand from waffling, often the death knell of modern brands.

By providing strategic brand messaging expertise—on demand—for deadline-driven marketing, Message Mapper gives you the benefit of reduced costs and improved ROI, through more disciplined—and results-driven—communication with your customers. More than just software, it provides thorough process and best practices for developing effective, validated brand messages that will be more readily adopted by internal and external stakeholders.

Because the process makes sense to executives and marketers alike, Message Mapper simplifies internal buy-in of proposed brand messages. It removes subjectivity and replaces it with a process that ultimately improves brand and marketing performance. This is particularly important for businesses that don’t have messaging expertise available on staff.

Message Mapper has been adopted by organizations of many sizes—from SMB to enterprise—to successfully launch corporate and product brands, rebrand products, realign brand portfolios, raise funding for start-ups, and a host of other results-oriented outcomes. See Message Mapper’s web site, https://www.9align.com, for a video overview of how the software works, as well as user testimonials citing outcomes and real business results.

Ever wonder what’s behind messaging experts’ brilliant ideas? How do they come up with those shiny silver-tongued strings of syllables that make customers feel they could betray their mom and hand over their firstborn if they had to, just to buy your brand?

For over a century, messaging experts protected the creative “black box,” that internal voodoo magical, mystical “process” that commanded huge fees and commensurate reverence for ad agencies and messaging consultants. Then, as marketing and advertising became more and more accountable for its spend, brand managers and marketers began to demand a process-driven approach to message development they could understand. This trend led to agencies “positioning by process,” whereby their differentiation was tied inextricably to process and results.

With as many “proven processes” today as there are promotional agencies, it would seem that these processes have commoditized themselves into oblivion. Yet when the best of breed are closely scrutinized and compared, a pattern of best practice begins to emerge.

Message Mapper Message Map

Over the last 11 years, I took it upon myself to reverse-engineer the creative brand messaging process, overlaying the business end of marketing, in a quest to produce a universal process for message development. I studied the most mystical of messaging gurus, reread the classics (Porter, Stone, etc.) and pored over the new classics (Davis & Dunn, Godin, Aaker, etc.). Finally I landed on a process that’s pretty simple, but requires discipline and a bit of data management.  I tested and refined the process with nearly 100 brands and launched a software version that was successful, but relied on expert facilitation and needed a database management component to make it easy to use. So, to make it more accessible to more people, Message Mapper online message development software was reconstructed to include built-in facilitation and a visual database tree to help users see brand stories come alive.

I’ll delve further into how Message Mapper 2.0 can bring order to the chaos of developing marketing messages in my next post. In the meantime, you can explore this new offering at https://www.9align.com. And check out the current promotion that lets you try Message Mapper 2.0 for just $1.