How to Execute a Single-Minded Message

Scroll Top

September 29, 2021 Strategy

If your brand stands for everything, it stands for nothing.

Nothing confuses your audience more than a mixed message. But it’s common for brands to try to say too much at once — effectively saying little at all.

In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, host Adam Morgan shares the ins and outs to simplify your messaging strategy — so you can reach your audience more powerfully.

Watch this episode to discover:

The importance of message hierarchy
The key elements of a successful creative brief
3 examples of effective single-minded messages

mentioned in this show:

Adam Morgan

Creative Leader and RCL Host

The Stoke Group

Digital Marketing and Full-Service Content Agency

Transcript

Adam Morgan: Hello. Welcome back to Real Creative Leadership, Season 2. First of all, thank you everyone who has stuck with me and listened to all of these crazy episodes. And I appreciate you joining along here. It’s nice and fun when some of you send out a note to me, an article of a certain episode that really spoke to you or gave you some good insight. And so, I appreciate the feedback. That’s fantastic. And as always, if there is a topic that you really, really care about, or that you want us to cover, or you want me to give some guidance on, please, please reach out.

All right, today we are going to talk about the single-minded message. This is a really, really important topic. It’s something that I’ve thought about for basically my whole career. In fact, let me start out with a story. So this was 1994, I believe, the first agency that I worked at was DSW or Dahlin Smith White. And before I got a job there, I had done a informational interview with one of the founders, Darrell Smith. I remember at the time I was considering whether I should go into the creative department as a writer or a designer, or if I should go into strategy. And he was the leader of all of the strategy group. And I remember he said something, it was very interesting because as we were talking about it, he said, Adam, listen, the truth is strategy is the same thing as creativity, it’s just packaged in a different way. Just like creative ideas, you’re trying to come up with new ideas and new ways of expressing the brand. And he said, in strategy, it’s the same thing, especially brand strategy. We’re just trying to make a new connection in a new way. And I thought that was fascinating. I thought about that. I still do, 25, 26 years later about the impact of creativity on strategy.

And for me to explain that a bit more, let me just break down a little bit before we get into the single-minded message, this is important. I want to talk about some of the basics of creativity. So especially in creative marketing or branding, really the big idea around creativity is this connection of two ideas where you’re taking one idea, maybe it’s like, whatever, something about the brand and then some other concepts that you’re trying to share with it. And you’re really bringing those two ideas together. I mean, that’s what my whole career has been about is like, is bringing together two or more ideas in a new way, right? If you ever want to, Doug Hall wrote a book, Jump Start Your Brain, it is phenomenal. I could probably do a whole separate episode on how concept ideas and how to get creativity faster in your ideas, but it talks a lot about, of these connection of these two ideas. So check out the book, Jump Start Your Brain if you want a lot of ideas on how to do this, but anyhow, that basic idea of creativity coming together.

Now here’s an important part about it. It’s usually best when it’s two ideas coming together. It is possible to get more than two, I’ve seen it, but sometimes it just gets too muddy. Let me give you an example. So where I’ve seen it worked with at least three ideas is the movie Crazy, Stupid, Love. It’s the one with Carell, Gosling, and Stone. And if you know, like the storyline, sorry, there’s going to be some spoilers here for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but there’s a relationship between Carell and Gosling in the whole dating thing. There’s a relationship between Carell and Stone because it’s father-daughter. And then there’s a separate relationship between Gosling and Stone, just them dating, right? And those are three separate storylines, but there’s a moment in the movie when all three of those storylines collide and become one storyline and you don’t see it coming. And when it all comes together, it’s a brilliant moment in that movie. It’s just like your brain explodes. But the thing about it is, you’ve spent an hour, an hour and a half, with that story in order to get deep enough where those ideas come together. In marketing, it just doesn’t happen that fast. Right?

There’s an example of when I learned to do TV from Chris Drysdale back in the 90s, in the mid 90s, at my first agency. He explained that the beauty of a TV spot is you have to summarize the whole concept down to one sentence because otherwise people who are new to creating TV spots start to add in more and more and more. It’s like, well, the protagonist says this, and then this happens. And then that happens. And then later on, some other person comes in and this happened, it’s just too complex for a 30-second TV spot. We had to just say, can you explain the idea in one sentence of like guy who was bald, meet someone on video dating. And she accidentally said, calling him Bob, calls him bald, right? It’s just a simple, simple idea. That was one of the examples that Chris did back in the 90s.

So now, trying to get it down to one sentence. When you’re on the creative side, putting together two ideas is really important. More than two is really, really hard. Now let me relate that back to marketing because that’s where the strategy idea that Darrell Smith talked about comes into play. If you think about some of those true principles of marketing, if you’ve ever read the book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Ries and Trout, brilliant book. But even if the basics of positioning is like, you’re really saying, all right, how can I position my brand against other brands? And what’s the difference? And it really comes down to, what do you focus on? What’s that single stake in the ground. What’s the one thing that you care about? And that’s super important when you’re trying to get a brand strategy across.

So if you think about it in terms of that — when you’re trying to create a brand or tell a marketing story — it’s the same thing. It’s bringing together two ideas. First of all, you’re bringing together, what are they? And then what are you trying to say? Those are the two things you’re saying. If you’re a brand, everything that they believe about you and the brand, and then here’s this new story, or ad, or experience that you’re trying to express. And you’re trying to take what you’re saying and blend it with that, those pre-existing conditions of the brand, right? So it’s two things coming together.

Or let’s say it’s a startup and you don’t even know anything about the brand. It’s still like, what do they do? When you’re really, you could introduce a new brand, a new name, and people have no idea what that company does. And so what they’re going to see is what does that company do? Are they finance? Are they a retail store? What are they? And then what is the thing that you’re saying about the brand and trying to bring those two together? So it’s really those, it’s the same thing, it’s bringing together two elements, whether it’s a new idea with the existing brand or a new idea with a new brand, a new company, whatever it is, it’s still that same idea.

And in my experience, there’s a great analogy that I’ve used over the years since the 90s, which is when you’re trying to express an ad or a brand story, or a brand experience, it’s really like this idea of the bed of nails.

If you have so many messages in this ad that there’s a dozen messages, it’s like a bed of nails. Someone will lay on it and nothing’s going to break through, they can just lay on it, even though they’re all sharp, really focused messages that are just too many of them, you can lay on it. But if you just have one nail, one message and someone tries to lay on that, it’s actually going to poke them in the back, it’s going to hurt. Right? And so, the fact of a bed of nails is a really good thing to remember when you’re creating an experience, an advertisement, anything: you need to be focused on one single idea, because that’s the only thing that’s going to break through. Too many, and it just doesn’t make sense.

If a beverage company were to do a commercial, and instead of just focusing on Mountain Dew, they focus on all the different fruity beverages that they had. No one would remember any of them, they would just be thinking about all these random things. It’s just too much. So focus, focus, focus is really important.

THE SINGLE-MINDED MESSAGE

So, that’s what we’re talking about today is the single-minded message. And in my experience over two and a half decades of working, it’s always been around the way that you express; that is, how are we translating marketing strategy to creative assets? It’s that coming together of marketing strategy and creativity. And that’s where we’re coming up with the big ideas, right? And more often than not, that expresses itself in the form of a creative brief where the strategy people come up with the big strategy. And then when they are ready to create something, they’ll build a creative brief and give it to the creative department. And then the creative department’s going to take that creative brief and go build this up, right?

And of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of creative briefs I’ve gotten, or downloads, or kickoff meetings — whatever you want to call it, whatever your experience is — almost always, for me as a creative, during that briefing moment, the most important thing that matters is that single-minded message. If I, even as a creative director later on, if I’m trying to distill it down for my team, to make sure that they’re on brand or on strategy, it all comes down to that single-minded message. And some people may call it different things, the main marketing message, the single-minded message, whatever it is, it’s so important that it focuses on one idea, because it’s always the existing stuff and then that new idea. So in your creative brief, you don’t introduce two messages because you’re already dealing with all the preconceived notions that people are dealing with. Right? You have to have one message and then all that existing feelings around that brand or that product, whatever.

So single-minded message is the most important thing. And let’s talk about that a little bit. So why single? Why should you have that single thing? We already talked about the bed of nails. We talked about creativity, but let me just talk a little more about the philosophy of restraint, because whenever I look at those creative briefs, it’s really like when we’re distilling it down to that single idea, it’s kind of like, we’re backwards-engineering stories. We’re saying, what is the story we’re going to tell this audience? What’s the message we’re trying to explain?

And so often, those stories are convoluted with so many different things, and I’ll tell you, it’s easy to add stuff to that single-minded message and it’s super hard to remove. So if you think about the philosophy of restraint, it’s really all about how can you get the skillset of pulling back, of focusing on a single thing rather than the too many things. I’ll tell you honestly, again, of the hundreds and hundreds of creative briefs I’ve had, nine times out of ten, it’s not a single-minded message. More often than not it has, 2, 3, 4, even a half-dozen messages all in that single sentence or paragraph. And so the trick is, whenever I talk to strategists, I talk to them about that skillset. That ability to have restraint and to focus in on a single idea is really, really hard. Most people can’t do it. Most people, they’ll listen to stakeholders, or they’re too scared and they’ll be like, “Oh, there’s so many things we got to talk about. We can’t just talk about one!” And so they’ll throw in a dozen ideas, right? But that is a skillset that you need. If you can learn to simplify, if you can learn to have focus on your story and your message down to a single idea, you have yourself a career. Absolutely. Because most people can’t do it. It’s really, really hard. And so just remember that it’s easy to add stuff in, but it’s hard to remove it from those single-minded messages. So if you can really get it down to one idea, you’re golden.

And now, there are two things that I want to give you deep examples on in how you do it, because the single-minded message is like the keystone of your story. But there are more elements. I know it’s unrealistic for me to think that, okay, the only thing we’re going to say in an ad, or the only thing that works on a website or an experience is one thing. But the single-minded message is the gateway. It’s the entry point. There can be other parts of the story, but everything can’t be the same importance. You have to create a hierarchy. And so the two things we’re going to talk about are hierarchy of messages and then the single-minded message. Good and bad examples and how you do it.

HIERARCHY OF MESSAGE: DEFINITION

So let’s start with hierarchy of message. What I’m going to do is I’m going to break away here and show you some examples of messaging documents. These are older documents, so they’re not relevant right now, but at least it’ll give you an idea of what I’m talking about if you’re trying to tell a story. Because when you really break down a story, there’s the story arc, which is, “What’s the biggest story that we’re trying to tell?” And then there are steps and moments of this story, like the hero’s journey, or whatever format or framework you use. So it’s important to think that the single-minded message is really explaining that story arc. What if there’s one takeaway, if there’s one story we remember from this experience? What is it? And then we can break down chapters of that story and say, okay, if the story is X, first, we do this. Then we do that. And then we do that.

And that’s really, I mean, to me, that’s the story message or the story arc and a story kit that I usually put together when I’m crafting messaging documents or experiences. And we’ll get more into that in a minute, but, let’s talk about that hierarchy of messages. So let’s break away here. I’m going to show you an example of this one page of a messaging doc that I got on financial services. And if you look at it, you can tell there’s a lot of information here. Like in classic messaging format, we’re going to have background and more context. And what are we trying to do? What are some of the problems that customers are having? Who’s our audience; what are they trying to solve? And what are some other challenges, and opportunities, and situations?

Over on the left, you’ve got the situation, you’ve got some context at the top, and you’ve got challenges and opportunities here. Now, normally as a creative, I get a document like this that has all this great context, and they’ll call it a brief. And they’ll give it to me and say, “Okay, great. Here’s the brief go off and make something.” But I just want to focus in here a little bit and just show you, even within this document, there are so many stories that I can tell — probably a hundred stories I could tell — and I’m just going to highlight a few:

our audience is being pulled in a million directions, or
historically they’ve ———-, or
things are just informational or digital engagement so you’re not having to deal with legacy systems, or
Millennials have heightened distrust towards financial institutions.

There’s so many stories. And imagine if I would say like, what is the big story out of this financial thing? I could’ve picked among any of these six or seven kind of single-minded messages and told that story. And usually when we’re creating experiences, there’s often a conflict between the creative department and the strategy department, and it often comes down to this: I would say 95% of the battles that I’ve had over the years have been on the focus of messaging. And so, for example, I, as a creative will take this brief, and I’ll go off and say, “Okay, there’s a dozen messages here. The main story that I talk about is digital engagement is an absolute necessity.”

So digital first, I’ve got to talk about digital first. That’s it. That’s a story. And I’ll build that as the story arc. And then all the little sub messages are building off of that, but that’s the main story I’m telling, right? And then here’s the problem: I go back, and I’ll share with stakeholders, or partners, or clients, and I’ll say, “Okay, we’ve built this story, here it is.” And they’ll look at it and they’ll say, “What are you…are you an idiot? Of course that’s not the story. It was clearly in the brief that the story is something else.” And I’m just completely lost and thinking, “Yeah, that was in there. All those things were in there, and I just had to choose, right? So I chose something.” And that right there is the core of the battle around messaging between the creatives and the strategist.

USE HIERARCHY OF MESSAGE TO FOCUS CREATIVE BRIEFS

So this is why it’s so important to have a hierarchy of messaging. In this whole thing of ideas and messages, it’s great to have all of them there for context, but there really needs to be an agreement on what is the main story. And that’s where the single-minded message comes in. And that’s where you put it at the top and you say, “Okay, here’s all this background, all these challenges, opportunities. But the main story we want to talk about is this: millennials don’t trust financial institutions, that’s the story.” And if we agree on that, if in the brief we have that single-minded message, that’s the single thing we want to talk about, whatever it may be. I’m not saying that wasn’t this example, but you’ve got to focus on what that single story is. So we know what the whole experience is going to be about.

When creatives go off, they’re wanting to come up with a whole bunch of concepts, right? Visual concepts, headline-driven concepts, whatever those ideas are, they’re going to take that single-minded message and put that with different creative ideas or different elements of the story, or even what expectations are of the brand. And they’re going to make those connections. So you have to stay focused. It’s so, so important to agree on what the single-minded message is, because that establishes everything. That establishes the whole story.

And then next, after you establish that single-minded message, then you have to put everything else in a hierarchy of message. So if I look again at that example, and if we had a really good doc, we would have said, “Here’s the main story, and here’s the next most important message, and then the next most and the next most.” And it’s really, really hard, but if you can, push back on your strategy people. Or if you’re a strategist, make sure you put it in a hierarchy. What’s the most important thing? They can’t all be number one. Most important story then the next most important message, third, fourth, fifth.

Now let’s say they’re going to create an email, and we’re going to create a landing page, we’re going to create some banner ads, we’re going to create whatever around this story that we’re trying to get out to an audience. That number one story, that’s going to be the concept, the single-minded message. And it may be the headline or maybe the main visual. And then all those other elements, maybe we’ll get number two and three and email body copy. And number four is the call to action, right? If we’re lucky. And landing page, because again, you can’t just have too many messages — the bed of nails — it won’t go through. That main thing is going to be in the landing page.

And then maybe we’ll have some supporting elements, but there has to be a hierarchy. It’s got to be a first, second, third. It can’t just be all three of these things are number one because we’ll pick one and it’ll be the wrong one. So, that’s the hierarchy of messages. I actually, years ago created a creative brief because if you’ve ever created creative briefs, it’s always like, “We’ve got the marketing objective, we’ve got background, we’ve got all the messaging pillars, even strategy documents.” There’s always several pillars, right? But pillars, when you look at them, they’re all equal, and that’s tricky. So I say, you have to take all that context, all that background, everything and put it in a hierarchy. And so at one point with some of my stakeholders, I made a creative brief that just said, here’s the main message, third, fourth, fifth, six, whatever. And that’s it.

We’re going to get back to how you craft a single-minded message, but you can’t have the ands — no ands, just one idea. And then as creatives, we can go back, and we can craft stories and experiences around that super easy, because we know what’s most important all the way down. So, that’s one way of doing it is just focus your creative brief with a hierarchy of message. That’s critical. You could even go more simple than that.

If you really want someone to react, what’s the emotion that you want them to feel, or what’s the message you want them to feel? And that’s it, just focus on that. And then for me, I feel like then it’s the hierarchy. Those are super effective briefs. If you get beyond it, go back to that example where there’s all those things, and we could tell a million different stories, and we probably won’t tell the right one. Or [go back to] the concept of creativity, just the basics of creativity. We can’t get four, or five, or six messages in there — the bed of nails thing — because it falls apart.

SINGLE-MINDED MESSAGES: EXAMPLES

Well, now I want to give you some examples, some good and bad, of a single-minded message. So these are just some examples that I’ve written up based on past brands or experiences, and I’ve generalized them so that it’s not a specific brand or a specific product, but at least you can get it. These were real actual, single-minded messages that I have received over the years in creative briefs.

So here’s this first one: “We provide your organization with creative philosophy of design and publish exceptional content in order to accelerate your business, your teams must create highlighted blah, blah, blah.” And it all is in a more streamlined way that was for a mobile app product that — oh my, why it was so complex? That was this key message that I got, the single-minded message. And you can tell it’s a paragraph, right? The half a dozen to a dozen different stories I could tell out of that.

And here’s another one from that same product at a different time: “We empower line of business owners and marketers to manage, produce, and deliver beautiful, engaging mobile apps that have the power to transform business, giving you control over the life cycle.” Look at that. There’s five different ideas. Managing is one, producing, delivering is one, engaging apps that have the power to transform business — that’s another one, beautiful as another one, control over the lifecycle — there’s another message like that. That’s a half a dozen messages. Even though it’s one sentence, it’s a half a dozen messages.

And that’s where I always say, if you really want to know if you’ve got a single-minded message, it can just have one idea. But a good clue is if I see and in there this and that and that, or a lot of commas — there’s a serial comma issue going on here — then there’s clearly a laundry list of stuff in there. So it’s not a single-minded message. You’re trying to fit them all in because you’re like, oh, this is important. So it’s that, and you’re trying to mash them all in there. You need to stop, again, learn how to remove not add — philosophy of restraint.

So here’s one more good example or bad example. And this one’s hilarious. If you notice it had 1, and then subsection 1.1, subsection 1.13, and sub sub sub section 1.13.1. And it was all about this data thing. That’s so much stuff. That’s not a key message. That was literally in the brief — in the key message section for me with all these subsections. So clearly not single-minded.

Now, let me give you some examples of a good single-minded key messages.

All right, here’s this first one, this was for an event. I need to register now to save with advanced pricing, that’s the story. Save on advanced pricing. Great. I can create all sorts of content and stories around that. The next one, this was after we worked with that strategist above. This is where we landed on that mobile app thing. It said, “Our tool helps you create beautiful mobile experiences.” That was it. All that other stuff — we narrowed it down to just create beautiful experiences. That’s it. Beautiful mobile experiences; single idea. And here’s another one. It was just a different industry one for travel and hospitality, “We help you create experiences that are timeless.” That was another one that we did a while back. But that was super clear: timeless experiences. Everything on that whole campaign was focused on timeless experiences, and there’s a lot of depth to it. And we certainly got into more elements on it with that campaign, but it was focusing on that single-minded message.

All right. So hopefully that makes sense. Single-minded message. It needs to be single, not a bed of nails. You can’t add ands, or commas, or other things, and add more junk in there. Really focus on making it streamlined and simple. And again, when you think back, if you’re, taking it from there, be on a creative brief. If you’re creating a messaging document, make sure your messaging document brings together the whole story arc, and words, and messaging all into one kit. And the most important part is find out what the story arc is. That’s your single-minded message. What’s the big story we’re trying to tell, one story. And then as you need more stuff underneath it, you can have the chapters in that story underneath it.

So no longer just saying, here are my three or four messaging pillars. No, those are chapters. What’s the first chapter, the second chapter, and the third chapter? And I can create a whole experience on just one chapter or one pillar, right? If it’s a deeper experience, but if I’m trying to look at the whole structure, what’s the story? What are the different chapters? How do they all fit together? And create an actual journey and flow of telling that story. Because just like, a good movie, a good story, a good everything, you have to have that flow. You can always zero in on things as we need to. And if you want an email just on chapter three, subsection two, great, we’ll do that. And that will be the one single-minded message, but in general messaging across this whole entire product, or brand, or whatever it is, what’s the story arc? What are you trying to say? And then break into chapter.

Anyhow, hopefully that’s helpful. That’s just me blabbing on about how I’ve tried to focus it in my experience over my career. And it really comes down to the value of focus experiences because if you have too many of them, it’s just going to be scattered, and you’ll stand for nothing. So what is that single stake in the ground that you stand for? What does that focus? What is that laser focus of what you are trying to say to your audience? And just pick that one thing and try and highlight on it. Anyhow, in my opinion, that’s where all the value comes. You can have multiple experiences, but you focus your experiences and then you connect them all. That’s how you create a great brand experience for us, for a customer.

So thanks for listening to this episode of Real Creative Leadership on the single-minded message. And again, this story isn’t just for creative people, but it’s for strategists, brand builders, business owners, leaders, whatever. It’s super helpful for all of us to really understand in telling messages for a brand or for a company to really focus on that single-minded message. Well, thanks for listening in, as always, you can find us on realcreativeleadership.com or across all of your favorite podcast platforms, or on YouTube, or wherever you want to find us. We appreciate you joining. Again as always, the final ask is if you enjoyed this, please like it, forward it to someone, give it a thumbs up, whatever it is, whatever platform you’re on, we appreciate it. As always, I’m open to a comment or feedback. If you have any, please let me know. We’ll address that in future sessions and try and take care of all of your creative leadership needs.

Again, you can also find me at adamwmorgan.com and as always, this whole series is produced by The Stoke Group. You can find them at thestokegroup.com. If you need help producing your own show, your own creative, your own brand experience, they can help you out. So thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye.

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Transcript