One of the main tasks of an organization is to communicate its value to people who might care. And with money on the table based on what you say, there is a particular urgency to get the message right.

Fortunately, there are some tried and true approaches that have great chances of working well, but when you’re staring at a blank page they may not seem particularly obvious.

A madison avenue marketer named Rosser Reeves wrote a NY times bestselling book in 1961 called Reality in Advertising, and as someone who takes an interest in reality and advertising, I wanted to learn more.

We don’t tend to think that ‘reality’ and ‘advertising’ go together at all. When we see the most expensive advertisements we are whisked away into worlds of fantasy and exaggeration, with talking babies, talking lizards, talking frogs, singing cheetahs, and human sized rabbits telling us to buy birth control.

With prominent examples like these, it is only natural to think that you need to have a flaming talking tortoise to market your business. But before you start digitally animating cute tortoises on fire and speeding down a busy freeway while yelling “F**k slow and steady,” let’s pause for a second.

If your first thoughts when thinking about the messaging of your business are a little more down to earth, like simply talking about how awesome you are, or the history of what you’ve done, or the techniques you use to make what you make, you’re a little closer to the reality you need to be close to, but you’re not quite there yet.

At this point, let’s consider some of the wisdom of Rosser Reeves. Reeves was a member of an advertising firm that had spent billions of dollars (and this was in the 1950s) advertising large manufacturing consumer brands, such as M&Ms, Anacin pain relief pills, and the successful presidential campaign of Dwight D Eisenhower.

In his book, he repeatedly discusses the data that he collected on various clients, and what kinds of strategies worked and what didn’t. He used test audiences for his commercials, so he could get an idea of which messages were landing and which messages weren’t before he would release a commercial nationwide.

So he used, at least loosely, scientific methods to arrive at his conclusions about what worked and what didn’t. This is one of the reasons we might want to consider trusting his advice. After running many tests, looking at lots of data from not only his firm, but other firms as well, he landed on what he thought was the key to successful advertising.

One of the first lessons he communicated in the book was a very simple conditional statement that a business must communicate to it’s audience.

He said that doing this one thing in your messaging will help you outperform businesses that don’t do this. His simple advice was to communicate this:

If I buy product x, then I will get benefit y

This was really his first lesson in reality and advertising, that had been earned through much trial and error, and spending a lot of his clients’ money. Toward the end of the book, he sums up this principle again in all capital letters:

IF THE PRODUCT DOES NOT MEET SOME EXISTING DESIRE OR NEED OF THE CONSUMER, THE ADVERTISING WILL ULTIMATELY FAIL.

Rosser Reeves

So the first step in crafting your core messaging is to consult the reality of your offer. What does it actually do for a customer? How is the life of your customer better off because they have your product?

At this point, we are not worried about uniqueness or differentiation, or “why choose me?” concerns. we are simply worried to understand what your product can do for someone. The answer to that question must be clearly communicated.

One of the most important aspects of creating a website for your company is to make sure that a visitor knows what you do, and they know it within seconds of arriving to your site. All too often, when you arrive on a website you see this big picture of people smiling, but you have to spend mental calories trying to figure out if this website really does what you think it does. People smile for a lot of reasons.

Now we can make the big shift. Now we can start to think about how you can compete with companies who do the exact same thing you do, or almost the exact same thing you do. Now it’s worth worrying about uniqueness, differentiation, and “the why choose me?” concern.

Reeves believed that if your company offered a superior product, then in most circumstances whatever made it superior should be the focus of your messaging. I recently spoke with some of the leaders of a world-class marketing firm in the Los Angeles area, and one of their directors talked about a company that brought them a product that was really easy to market. What makes a product easier to market is if it is clearly and measurably the superior product.

Reeves may have felt something similar as he was marketing M&Ms, because no other chocolate could or did boast that it melted in your mouth, not your hands. When a product is clearly superior, the marketing tends to get easier.

But we have to acknowledge that there are so many products that are basically the same, and one really isn’t much better than another. Think of a pest control company – if they come and kill all the pests in your home or apartment, then that’s pretty much all you need them to do. Maybe they can offer 60 day guarantees, subscription services, or dress up like leopards when they come, but all you really care about is that they kill the rats in your basement.

After you are able to clearly articulate how your product benefits a customer, and you turn to the “why choose me?” question, you have to articulate an answer in what can be called (the all too familiar marketing term) the value proposition.

The value proposition can be for a specific product or service, such as a quote and promise for removing gophers in a front yard. Or it can be much broader, and try to encapsulate the value that an entire business can provide to someone.

When you construct value propositions for your entire business, this can be called core messaging. This is the message that may be captured by taglines, elevator pitches, and the first words a visitor to your website will see. Instead of advertising a specific product offering, your business as a whole becomes the product.

However you dress up your value proposition, it needs to communicate two things. At the risk of being overly simply and obvious, those two are the following:

This is the benefit you get from us.

This is why you should choose us over someone else.

Sometimes, customers aren’t particularly choosy, and they will happily pick the first solution that comes to them. You’re hungry and you want Mexican food, which Mexican place is the closest? Let’s go there.

But when customers are choosy, they need reasons to select you over someone else. Your core messaging needs to give them what they need, quickly and conveniently.

So let’s look a little more closely at more specific things to think about as you’re crafting or revising your organization’s value proposition.

Fast forward from Rosser Reeves in 1961 to A Harvard Business Review article from 2006, titled Customer Value Propositions in Business Markets, written by several university marketing professors. They studied value propositions in the B2B sector from all over the United States, and identified some helpful suggestions for crafting value propositions. They were specifically talking about products that were being sold in the B2B areas, but I think their conclusions can apply to core messaging as well.

They found that there are three basic types of value propositions, so as I mention these, see which ones speak to your organization the most. The authors found that number 3 tended to work the best, but it is also the most difficult to achieve.

The authors of the article recommend the resonating focus approach because this method is more intimately in tune with the customer’s needs. The deep knowledge that this method requires has to come from a kind of familiarity that can best be gained through living a particular reality for a while.

For example, if you were in pest control services for 15 years, and then you go to work for a pest control supply company, then you have the knowledge because you lived it. You will have the intimate knowledge required to respond to a thousand tiny details that others may not know.

In copywriting, it is fairly common for someone who has been a part of a profession for 20 or 30 years to leave their job within the profession to write for it. There are numerous stories of people leaving their 9 to 5 industry job to work as freelance writers for the industry where they had their 9 to 5 job. A few examples include engineers who left their cubicle to write for other engineers and former competitive ice skaters who write for ice skating television networks.

Being able to have a high level of knowledge of the customer is one of the reasons the resonating focus value proposition is the better of these alternatives, but also the hardest. It isn’t always possible to recruit someone from an industry to help you sell to that industry, although it happens regularly. In the B2B world one can understand how this method would have an advantage because it is so customized to an individual customer.

In the B2C world, the resonating focus method takes on a different characteristic, but the fundamentals are the same. The concept of a benefit may need some further clarifying, and the specific way a business can deliver those benefits may need further explaining, but the fundamental principle is the same.

Crafting the core messaging of your organization is deceptively complicated. But by tethering whatever you say to the reality of what your customer values, and why they should choose you over your competitors, you will be in the frame of mind to create the messaging that generates results.

I would be delighted to work on that process with you. To learn more about my core messaging consultation, please click here. Or if you’d like to discuss a project, e-mail me, or fill out this contact form.