Product launches are all about telling stories, connecting latent and active desires with the possibility of a resolution. We tell corporate stories to simplify the complex, define and reinforce the brand, and engage our audience to buy products or invest. But a consistent challenge for product managers is up-leveling their product launch messaging and connecting them to the corporate stories. Such connected, or hierarchical, messages are more impactful, easier to absorb, and the product benefits from a multiplier effect. Lack of connectedness creates risk the campaign will come across flat, and resort to touting features, feeds, and speeds. Why does this happen? What can be done about it? And what does this have to do with executive communications?
My belief is the biggest inhibitor of teams producing good messaging is a lack of practice. Creating up-leveled messaging is hard work, and product teams are squeezed for time, especially during launch preparations. I've previously blogged how corporate and product messages and stories evolve, Who Owns the Story?. In addition, product teams may simply not be in tune with corporate stories. They may not have experience creating up-leveled messages. Or worse, their management may not insist on a disciplined approach to product launch and messaging. It can become too easy for teams to "work on the press release" as their messaging activity.
To fix this first requires a disciplined approach to corporate story creation and education. The stories and messages must exist at the corporate level. Many product launch teams seek out the corporate story to connect to. If they are easily identified, or already top of mind, team leaders will create a good hierarchically connected story. The next likely cause is a lack of experience or training on creating good product messaging and connecting to corporate stories. And finally, there needs to be a launch messaging process discipline to impose message creation deadlines and reviews to increase launch readiness. These gates create opportunities to raise the red flag that a project is off course, and bring leadership to the project.
In most cases leadership to create good messaging resides in the product team. Corporate marketing plays a role in setting the timeline and standards for launch preparations, to manage exceptions. And the corporate stories and messages need to be in place. We have a product launch best practice to bring corporate marketing together with the launch team 3 to 6 months ahead of the launch date, collaborating to create high quality messaging, and higher overall team efficiency.
Executive communications contributes the corporate stories (or we create new stories), and we flesh out messaging in three phases. First is a 1 page template that is essentially the value proposition. Each section decomposes the elements of the value proposition, so that the product team can look at each separately, and compare them for connectedness and balance. Then we create a single slide that our executive team uses in NDA customer management meetings. Finally we create copy for a few assets that will used in the launch and campaign. These give the team an opportunity to review the messages in the wild.
As an example, here is a hierarchical set of assets that were sourced at the very beginning of a recent launch planning. Each helped refine the messaging and stories, making for an effective go-to-market.
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