I’ll cut to the chase. The answer is yes, message still matters. Not only that, but it matters more than anything else. Waaayyy more, as it turns out. And that’s what surprised me — that it wasn’t even close.
Count this as one of the chief insights you’ll discover in my research report called Message Mentality™: What Marketing Leaders Think, Feel, And Do About Message Strategy. You can read the report for free. (A $30,000 value!) You don’t even have to give up your email address.
In this post, I’ll reference some other key insights, but mostly I’ll give you some context around this message research — background, motivation, process — things the report itself doesn’t tell you.
Let’s go back to 2021. At this time, I’d been heading up Counterpart Communication Design for 19 years. We’d worked for FedEx, P&G, Terminix, Progressive, AARP, Hilton, and more. Our average YOY revenue growth was 39%. Clearly, we were doing something right. I credited a good portion of our success to our message strategy approach.
Emboldened, I set out to “write the book” on message strategy. I was going to tell the world: “This is what works. This is the way.”
Then I got nervous. I was going hard with my convictions, but they were based on my own experience. What if they weren’t universally true? Or no longer true? I mean, marketing is more complex than ever. Is message even that important to anybody anymore?
Prideful as I am, I didn’t want to be wrong. So I decided to invest in some research. I was either going to prove I was right, or I was going to avoid a huge embarrassment.
About that time I learned about the research firm Audience Audit. And I was impressed by its leader, Susan Baier. We talked. She was whip-smart, challenging me and encouraging me at the same time. Just what I needed. Let’s go!
Audience Audit put together a cohort of 408 marketing leaders. They represented small, medium, and large businesses across 48 states. Respondents were diverse in gender, experience… all the things you’d expect. We ascertained a margin of error of ±4.8% at a 95% confidence level.
The survey took 15 minutes to take. Contributing to the questions was renowned consultant Tamsen Webster, founder of the Message Design Institute, and author of Find Your Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible and Say What They Can’t Unhear: The 9 Principles Of Lasting Change.
I remember the day Audience Audit first revealed the results. Susan raced through the figures. She and Tamsen were on fire, instantly uncovering insights. I, on the other hand, was bewildered. This was drinking through a firehose. My head was spinning.
I needed time with it. A lot of time. Months, I admit. I pored over the numbers again and again. I analyzed some 4,000 verbatims, one by one. It made me anxious. I got up and paced. I stared out the window.
Writing this research report was a challenge I’d never exactly faced before. Yes, I’d been a writer for more than 30 years. Yes, I’d worked with countless research reports. But now I had to write one on my own. And I couldn’t do it without first deciding what this research actually meant.
I was deathly afraid of my own bias. As an overly conscientious person, I was determined to be objective, even if it worked against me.
In the end, this messaging research had some major conclusions. Certainly I was hoping that marketers believed message was most important. I just never imagined the results would be so convincing.
And then there were other learnings I didn’t anticipate.
Audience Audit developed an attitudinal segmentation of the respondents. I had no idea this was going to happen. It was done by their software, uninfluenced by human opinion, and based on common traits.
We found that there are 3 types of marketers. We named them:
Also interesting:
Check out the research to learn more, and to see the defining characteristics of each segment. Which group do you align with?
Here’s a key question we asked: What do you think makes your organization’s marketing message so effective? This was open-ended — no premeditated answers.
I analyzed all the responses and put them into 5 buckets. These were the factors our respondents identified for marketing success:
I’ve already told you which one they said was most important. But by how much? Check out the research to find out, and see how all the success factors ranked.
This to me is the biggest finding of all. If you don’t consider yourself Confident & Effective, can you become so? Is there some knowledge or practice that Confident & Effective marketers share? Something that anyone else can do, regardless of company size and resources? This research study indicates there is.
I’ll say no more. You already know how to find out more.
I feel good about the accuracy of these findings, and I believe in the conclusions. But I’d love to hear your thoughts. How’d I do on my first-ever research endeavor? Please give me some feedback.
Here are some initial reactions:
“First of all, LOVE the conversational tone of it all! Easy to read. The quotes are great, too. Truly relevant and meaningful. The whole thing is very well organized. This actually provides root-cause consideration in a fresh, eye-opening way.”
— Carrie Perry, Carrie Perry Coaching & Consulting
“This is truly a world-class report. I love the tone — authentic, friendly, readable. Not too overwhelming. You show readers how to find what they’re interested in, and then tie it all together. Beautifully explained.”
— Susan Baier, Audience Audit
“Sheperd’s research is genius level.”
— Michael Neray, core messaging and category design consultant
Yay for me. But more important, I hope: Yay for you. I’m praying that this work will help everybody feel more confident and become more effective.
Find out where you fit among your peers. Download the study at messagementality.com.
Cheer me or challenge me. I really want to know what you think.
Report your results. If you took these findings to heart — and into action — did they help you?
Influence what’s next. I plan to do more research related to message strategy. What would you like to know?
