Brand Messaging That Cuts Through

Welcome And Guest Introduction

My guest today will discuss the key message for brand and build audiences and how organizations can brainstorm create and request key messages for internal and external audiences. Now joining me today is Stefan Power. He is the president and CFO of the PowerPoint group. And he joins me today from Los Angeles, California. Stefan, welcome to the podcast. Well, let's uh talk about some of the messaging problems, what some of the messaging problems are and what those corrective actions are. Absolutely, absolutely.

So at the Pollock Group, we've been in the public relations and

Messaging As The Marketing Foundation

integrated marketing world for the last 41 years. And throughout our history and throughout our time, one state is one thing has stayed consistent all the way throughout. That if you have foundational, structured messaging, you have an infrastructure that lays the base for really compelling activations and marketing tactics and PR programming that can deliver that messaging. So one of the things that we always counsel our clients on is that you may have existing messaging, your market might have shifted a little bit. The very first thing we should do is either brush up on the messaging and make sure that it's consistent and current before we're spending kind of good money after bad, so to speak, and make sure that the message is our landing and that they're appropriate for the various channels in which we want to communicate. It all leads to kind of better decision making, starting with kind of better insight, so to speak.

So let's say that uh you are a new firm and and you find out that the your message is not registering with your potential clients or uh audiences. How do you go about rectifying that?

Yeah, so the very first thing that we would start is is doing some research into the audiences and the personas and the audiences that we're trying to reach. So much is shifted in the communications landscape about how people consume information and when they consume information. And obviously, we're consuming information all day long, morning, noon, and night, and in between, of course. And so consumers are absorbing and behaving a little bit differently than they've done in the past with the onslaught of the volume of information. They're gonna have to really decipher what is noise and what is a signal, right? And so brands oftentimes produce a lot of noise in search of a signal. And it's really important that you kind of pause up front, start to determine what are those kind of key signaling moments in your in your brand architecture, and how can you deliver clear aligned brand messaging that can strengthen your PR in social and marketing and sales functions to make sure that the brand is consistent across every channel. It's somewhat sometimes the consistency that is the most important thing. Brands sometimes try something, don't have the patience for it, try something else. And what emanates is fragmented messaging from every various department, both internally and externally of the company. So you really want to align the entire organization around your core messages so that everybody's kind of speaking from the same script. It's not only just built for the human audiences, but also the algorithm audiences that will help you and brands kind of future proof their messages so that when the algorithms and the language models are finding you, not only is your SEO search engine optimization working for you, but your GEO, your generative engine optimization, also is working for you because so many people, reporters, customers, clients, whatever you call your end and consumer out there, is not only just using Google as a search engine, but they're also using all the various AI systems for it. So it's more than just messaging, it's really a structured, kind of researched, informed system that can organize the brand into clear, compelling, repeatable language.

You know, that brings up another piece of information. There's also an AEO that uh when folks are maybe looking for your company, that AEO is the answer that uh you're looking for the uh platforms to give back with your name uh attached to it so that you can be found easier as part of the marketing as well.

Yes. Uh AEO and GEO are intertwined in terms of being able, not only should the language models be able to search various content that's out there on the internet and then kind of bring that back, but you're right, and that it it has to manifest itself in this answer that the that the language model is producing.

Well, now let's say you your organizations are facing some competitive pressures to shake things up. What sort of message changes would you recommend there? How would you go about changing those uh those messages?

Yeah, so first and foremost, markets are extremely crowded and in a weird way these days, extremely polarized, right? So attention spans are shrinking, you know, there's marketing says one thing, sales says another, industries are shifting fast. Industries that we loved yesterday are shrinking

Audience Research Plus SEO GEO AEO

and new industries are are popping up and thrusting forward. So the discovery that organizations need to go on is to make sure that, like I said before, you're both on a kind of an algorithm-driven discovery process, but you're also on a human-driven one. So as a result, it's important that brands and organizations kind of take a step back. And I'll tell you a good story. So many years ago, we were a finalist for a new client. It was an RFP process, and we came in second. And I know a lot of agencies say they came in second, but I know legitimately this time we came in second because the brand called us up and said, You were so close, you were second. So I said, Okay, thank you very much. You know, wish you good luck. In three months time, we got a phone call from the very per same person who said you came in second, and said, We'd like to consider hiring you. And I said, Well, what happened? And they said, Well, this article came out and the headline is not exactly on brand with what we were trying to achieve. And I I said, Let me stop you for a second. I know our proposal had the first sixty days of really analyzing the audiences and coming up with core messaging and doing the research. I said, Let me guess the proposal that you picked didn't have that in there. And they said, Yeah, we didn't want to spend the time on the 60 days. And I and I said, Ah, so here we are. Didn't want to spend the time on 60 days. However, you now have the article that came out that is not exactly on brand. So I said, I'm happy to re-engage with you all, but of course I'm not gonna go through the RFP process again, and I'm gonna ask that you commit to doing the 60 days of the messaging work. And they agreed to both. And we got to work. The next 60 days was nothing about or was all about, excuse me, developing the messaging platform and researching the audiences. We kind of re-themed and restripped all the messaging pointed in the d desired result that we were looking for from what the headline that we wanted to achieve once the media relations program started to kick up. And once we did that, we were able to kind of rewrite the narrative and represent the information. And, you know, not to get into the details, but on one side, the previous headline was, oh, this is this organization's kind of happy go-lucky. On the outcome after our messaging, we needed the messaging to be rooted in science. And so that redictated what our programming would be, that would be that redictated who our mouthpieces and our spokespeople would be and what the delivery mechanism was for the messages. Once we did that, then the end result was articles in The Guardian and Fast Company about how innovative and everything that they were doing. And the headlines actually were rooted in science. And that's exactly what they wanted to do because they weren't on some kind of frivolous mission of trying to reinvent and innovate what they were doing as an organization. They were on a very serious, science-rich induced mission that was not getting its kind of right day in the sun, so to speak. And because we went through this messaging exercise, you know, we were able to kind of reposition and get them to kind of stop throwing good money after bad and re-remessage everything for them.

Competitive Pressure And Narrative Reset

So it it helps not waste time, quite frankly, if you actually spend the time. So in a weird way, you have to spend the time in order to not waste the time, right? And it helps you create stronger messages because weak media and narratives actually don't land, right? It also then ends up creating content that isn't built for search or isn't built for AI or isn't or becomes more painful if your messages are off-brand and when you're onboarding new internal team members or new agency partners join, you have to make sure that your messaging is on target and more importantly, that it doesn't go stale the second it hits the market and then the market shifts.

So that that pretty much says that something along the lines that you getting, as you mentioned, a brand refresh that uh perhaps was needed so that uh they could continue or at least do what they intended to do in the beginning.

Yes, for sure. I mean, I think that most brands think that you know they spend their time doing their internal branding exercises and working with brand agencies and all that stuff, and they come up with wonderful creative and wonderful taglines. But in PR and narrative storytelling, you know, taglines aren't a message. Right? So I think that some people think that messaging is a nice to have and kind of a wordsmithing exercise, but we tend to think of it more as the infrastructure or, if you will, the operating system that every organization, spokesperson, campaign, and algorithm actually pulls from. So at that point, it becomes a unifying language map for PR, sales, marketing, product managers, social media, so that really nobody's improvising. Everybody kind of has a script and it helps then build things for searchability so that SEO isn't an afterthought. It's actually baked into the language itself. You know, most organizations run lean and mean these days with internal staffs may be not as strong as they used to be in terms of numbers, right? So it helps you kind of eliminate inconsistency at the source rather than kind of having to edit it out after the fact.

Well, suppose an organization they look around and they find out that the sales are dwindling or that the market share is declining. What approach would you take then to uh develop uh a new message, if you will?

Yeah, so I would actually step back and do something that before the messaging actually starts to happen is I would do an audience mapping system. So here at Pollock we have a solution called audience IQ, and it helps us remove the kind of guessing before we start knowing, right? There's a lot of assumptions that go into messaging when it's being kind of done in a vacuum. But if you even have a pre-quill, if you will, to the messaging programming and really do kind of some deep dive audience IQ, you'll start to learn what resonate resonates and kind of what doesn't and kind of what to do next. And I think that a lot of organizations and I'm sure agencies do rely on instinct when making kind of important communications decisions. So our audience IQ

Why Taglines Are Not Messaging

solution helps organizations kind of test ideas, test messages, test strategies. And we have a platform that integrates into our into our audience IQ. It's called Smart Focus AI. And what it does is it allows us to build scenario-aware custom-built AI audiences. So before launch or before doing any messaging, we can provide kind of fast, actionable insights into how the potential customers or audience or key stakeholders are likely to respond to a message. And that allows us to create some research methodologies and technologies, but with the use of technology to provide our layer of expert analysis to help organizations make smarter decisions as they as they embark on a messaging exercise.

You know, that might just answer the uh question I had coming up next in terms of a brand possessing a negative perception in the media or with consumers. It sounds like some of what you just talked about applies to uh this particular area as well.

Yeah, there used to be a saying that, you know, you had one chance to make your perception and then you kind of lay down and go to sleep, right? I think that that has completely upended, right? Because your perception is being now made at every interaction in your organization with it with a consumer, right? So the cashier at a retail establishment is establishing the perception for you. The the mater D at a restaurant is establishing the perception of your brand. The customer service

Audience IQ And Smart Focus AI

person on the 1-800 number is providing the perception, right? So there's a lot of what I would call frontline people that are interacting with your desired audience that really are the ambassadors of your brand. Right? So negative perception can happen very quickly in a remote corner of your organization that you may or may not have been paying attention to. And it is so important that that one interaction dictates how your brand is perceived. And so without the kind of upfront audience research in terms of understanding how your consumer interacts with your brand, you know, they interact walking into the store, they interact with asking, you know, where is the soap on aisle six, and whoever they ask that person on the on the floor and how that interaction happens. Almost at every stage you have an opportunity to re-establish and and ignite your brand perception just through the simple everyday interactions with your brand. And I think that people sometimes are so focused, brands and organizations are so focused on making sure that their top line messages are are perfect, that it's the downstream messages that are the most important because those are the ones that are delivering your your product to the consumer. And that's where your consumer is walking away with your perception. So when you're doing audience mapping and both internal and external analysis of how your messages actually need to land and where they need to land, it needs to be a holistic approach in terms of engaging with an agency such as ours or whomever is leading the message mapping exercise. Because if you kind of leave a blind spot open, you're kind of open for your perception to be changed by some off interaction that takes place that you weren't paying attention to.

And you know, I think that's a very, very important point because like you said, perception messaging runs from the CEO down to the delivery person and everybody in between.

Perception Is Built At Touchpoints

They might have a attitude about even being there. So those kinds of things that that you have to say that people need to make sure or management need to make sure from top to bottom that we're all not only on the same page that we're also equally treating people so that they feel like they want to be there and can honestly deliver our good solid message. Oh, 100%.

And not to go personal here, but our family just recently lost a beloved dog that was family member for 14 years. And, you know, the animal care hospital was terrific, right? Everything about it. And then we wanted to, you know, have, you know, as often the case of you know, the ashes or whatever to uh be as a keepsake and kind of stay with our family, right? Just yesterday, the delivery person delivered the remains. The delivery person was so compassionate and so uh for lack of a better word, loving, you know, delivering and caring and so empathetic that, you know, we had long paid for this service already, you know, weeks ago, right? But all the way two or three weeks later, we still get this very kind of empathetic feel from the person who just drove up to our house and rang the doorbell and delivered it. And so it has to be this kind of complete messaging cycle and really understanding, you know, the emotional state of your consumer and the various touch points that they're interacting with your brand. You know, I obviously walk away with a an amazingly impressed perception of the entire process, something that was obviously very traumatic for my family, but also done with such care at every interaction. It obviously obviously as a marketer, it didn't go unnoticed on me about the level of care that happened throughout the entire process.

Well, you know, I I can certainly appreciate that because those things are important. That's why I say from top to bottom that uh organizations need to make sure that uh they're they're treating their uh employees and staff uh well and uh that they are messages, whether they know it or not, uh they do represent the company in public and and elsewhere.

Yeah. It's so important, you know, consistent differentiated message messaging, quite frankly, is right now one of the best competitive advantage advantages that really cuts through the noise. Nothing slows down an organization more than unclear messaging. And a good messaging process kind of fixes that at the source. You know, this sadly, like I explained in my example in the RFP process, this isn't the flashy part of the work, right? This is the part of the work that actually makes the flashy part make sense. And I think some people lose that, right? So often the smartest first move in any partnership is messaging, because everything

Mergers Crises And Messaging Alignment

else is downstream from that. Everything else gets faster and easier because again, it makes the flashy part actually work.

Well, you know, I think that brings up another thing because when we talk about perhaps companies that might be in the middle of a merger or acquisition, and maybe because they're coming from two different areas or ways of thinking, uh how how one should go about making sure now that we all have a consistent message because we brought our two companies together.

Yes. Couldn't agree with you more in that, you know, if you just kind of go through the checklist of kind of who needs this, right? It's perfect for a startup with a great idea but no real identity. It's perfect for a mid merger or acquisition company that's trying to bring in two cultures and two messages and create a complementary narrative to be able to go to market with. It's perfect for a brand whose kind of industry is shifting underneath them. Think about the entertainment world and think about what's happening in commercial real estate. It's perfect for a brand who's really under a lot of competitive pressure and is chasing price to zero because their marketplace is getting commoditized right underneath their feet. It's perfect for a brand whose audience has changed but the messaging actually hasn't. It's perfect for a brand that has declining sales and needs to be able to kind of trace that back to unclear positioning. It's perfect for a company coming out of a crisis or one that actually has been carrying a negative image for a little while. And kind of simply put, you know, messaging that and having professionals in the room who already knows how to fix things kind of goes a very, very, very long way.

You know that uh that brings up I think you might recall of oh I don't know whether it was the last year sometime where Cracker Barrel decided to uh change their logo and some other things. I'm not sure who they ask about that, but uh that went over like a lead balloon.

Yeah with within eight weeks and about $300 million it went right back to the place where they were yeah and and again I you know again that's I think a result of and I don't know or

Brand Refresh Pitfalls And Cracker Barrel

pretend to know what the decision making process was in that in that particular scenario. But it could be a result of not really kind of going back and yes we need to modernize we need to modernize we need to modernize but we also kind of forgot to check where our core base was about modernization and maybe we needed to go back and actually talk to our core audience and not just kind of talk to the people that just want to tell us what we want to hear.

No I was about to say that's exactly the same what I was going to say that you know talking to the people who come in and and who who are your your clo your c not classic customers what do they think of that how would you feel about this?

Yeah so that brings up a really important point about the kind of use of traditional focus groups. Traditional focus groups when you're testing a commercial or a brand refresh or whatever are important of course but they're amazingly costly they usually are physical and meaning people need to get to a certain location they need to sit in the conference room you need to pay a moderator you need to pay participants right and at the end of the day you have a microcosm of what you think would be your audience who quite frankly are being paid to be there. So there's you know

Traditional Focus Groups Versus AI Panels

there's already one kind of piece to that but sometimes you know it kind of works like the way that a jury box works you know when they're trying to decide a case you know maybe somebody's looking at their watch maybe somebody needs to go pick up their kid after school maybe somebody's trying to influence the table and say let's get out of here and let's just make this decision right same thing happens in traditional focus groups right there can be a couple people that are kind of swinging the conversation in a particular direction. With our audience IQ solution and being powered by smart focus this AI focus groups enable a lot of decision making happen without the bias. Now I know a lot of people think that AI is biased but it doesn't have to be you know smart focus has created a way for the participants to be true and honest and disagree with each other and you get a lot more real honest feedback that you would get from a traditional focus group because it's possible that the focus group discussion's being coerced by a few loud voices. So super important to go back and really kind of look at what people are telling you but why are people telling you this? Are they telling you this because they want to go and leave and you know go pick up their kid after school or are they telling this because that's what they truly believe? And I think that there are a lot of situations that we said, oh okay we ran two traditional focus groups and it told us all this great information but it did it really or did it just tell you what you wanted to hear?

And you know I think that's very very important to be able to make that sort of distinction in the process of making a dis or before making a a decision on, you know, are you going to move forward with this information or do you need to supplement it through some other means.

Yeah I mean if you think about it it's we're really looking for intelligent feedback mechanisms that allow us to make better informed decisions. So it's um super important for you to get the recommendations in kind of a structured way but not in a way that can just appease people if you will.

Do you think that there's an opportunity for AI to provide any sort of insight into our perceptions of organizations?

Oh most definitely most definitely I think that you know obviously there's a lot of discussion about you know will AI replace particular jobs or whatever and you know that the jury's still out on that right but what AI can do is truly remarkable in terms of being able to gauge instincts audience insights and coalesce

AI Research Democratization And Prompting

a bunch of data together that may or may not have been at your fingertips as an organization. It also again I'm an agency of about 20 people across Los Angeles and New York I had to convince my clients in the past to try and do research right I had to convince my clients to set aside a research budget kind of go back to that RFP example I gave you earlier in the in the conversation I had to convince them that it was worth doing the 60 days of messaging architecture. What AI does now is it helps democratize a lot of that and puts research departments right in the hands of every executive and so what's happening is that your cost for research again going back to the traditional focus group that can be anywhere between a $30 and $80,000 thing right to do a traditional focus group to recruit people to pay them to pay a moderator to do all that great stuff right and then you have a beginning middle and end and then it ends and then you get a report. With AI and with think tools like Smart Focus I'm able to go back in and not only have a complete dialogue but I can break the kind of focus group mirror if you will and come out behind the glass and actually have real honest conversations and most importantly it doesn't end. I've had these conversations with AI personas and focus groups and when the focus group is over now I have a trained up panel that I can go ask any question anytime. It doesn't have to have an end and that is one of the most valuable tools of AI these days that you know again my traditional focus group sitting in a hotel room in a conference room on a Saturday that's over at Saturday at one o'clock but with these new t platforms and tools and the use of AI I can have an infinite conversation going on with people. It doesn't have to end at Saturday at one o'clock and that is a major difference of what is happening and what is at the fingertips of people and how language models and AI is going to really help level the playing field. You know it used to be that you know the large multinational agencies had you know massive global research departments in them and all that stuff. Well an agency of 20 people can't do that. We just are not resourced that way. Right? So we're reliant on clients to have research departments in it and to budget for research and all that other stuff. That whole paradigm has changed now. And that allows agencies our size to have hundred people research departments at our fingertips.

Well I certainly agree with you there because AI and the various platforms that are available I've used them uh prolifically you know to to get one a wide range of information and for all practical purposes not uh biased in any particular way from from what I can detect. So that helps me appreciate it as well.

Yeah it's it's super important to yes you know maybe there's some bias in some places in other areas but you know it's also part of the prompting right a lot of people will prompt on positive things. It's equally important to prompt on the negative things. So I'm interested in speaking with you know consumers from 18 to 25 in southern states in the United States that you know have an income of whatever I'm not interested in speaking with you know people older than 35 who don't live in Southern County you know so making sure that you're educating the AI and and specifically of what you're looking for and more importantly the negative of what you're not looking for.

Well I can certainly appreciate that I'm just I'm wondering now do you have any sort of closing remarks because we've covered quite a bit here in our time to put it back if anything you think that you might have missed.

I appreciate that we sure covered a lot of ground and you know it's really an exciting time to be in the communications field and the marketing field and the public relations field social media field you know digital marketing field all these fields are coming together and the lines are blurring and it's

Final Takeaways And Closing

really an exciting time to work in it. I've been at this for this is my third decade in in public relations and marketing every day is a new day and every day is an exciting day because of the the advancements and the and the acceptance quite frankly of the tools that we use to be able to do our job. I remember that it we used to be very far from the C-suite back in my early days of career we're we're right in the C-suite at this point.

Well so let me say thank you so very very much for being a guest on the Public Relations podcast. Believe me I have enjoyed it I've learned something and I think our guests will uh fully appreciate it because this has been a very substantive uh conversation that we've had and until a lot of people will benefit from it.

I very much appreciate you having me on thank you so much and every day's a new day so let's go out there and do some wonderful messaging position on behalf of all the brands and organizations that are so deserving of it.

That's great. My guess is a policy tweet on the podcast