Real Strategy vs. Marketing Strategy

The ideal marketing or messaging strategy is to find something your competitors cannot say and will not say, that also aligns with what the company can do. Ideally you can communicate it to the market and the company itself doesn't have to change at all: not its operations, customer success, development, production or manufacturing. It can be completely unaware of what you're saying to the market, because what you say doesn't require it to change.

From time to time, this is what I have to do. We have to come up with something to say to the marketplace that's noticeable and memorable, conveys safety and hope, gets people's attention and resonates. And the company behind it, the one making and distributing and selling the thing, doesn't have to change anything it does. The product, the processes and the leadership stay as they are.

That's not easy, but it's often doable without sounding like you're copying everyone else.

If the company has a good overall strategy, fantastic. The messaging strategy is basically an adjunct, or a child, of that strategy. In most cases the company doesn't have one, and then you need a marketing strategy. Marketing's messaging strategy will be something competitors can't and won't say, that doesn't affect the business at all, conveys hope, safety and confidence, and is noticeable and memorable.

Easy, right? Anybody can do that. It takes a bit of an exercise. It's not easy, and it can take a while.