Why strategy and messaging are inseparable

How do you translate a high-level strategy into specific, hard-to-reverse trigger decisions – like hiring an executive, taking your sales and marketing team to a conference, or developing a new product offering? By first expressing the strategy as messaging or even sales copy. This isn’t just because it’s easier to undo words. It’s also because you better understand a  business or product strategy once you write it down and expose it to public scrutiny. Messaging keeps business strategy honest; wherever you get one, get the other from the same place. To make this concrete, I once had a predictive AI client whose software performed a very specific task: locate the perfect site, in terms of long-term profitability, to build a hospital or clinic. The idea was to do this with Big-Data AI rather than consulting horsepower; from 3 months to 3 hours. I was surprised to learn that although much of the data was purchased, much was manually curated if not created by hand. In fact, this business model brought the AI software firm into possession of a valuable data set: businesses that sell products and services to hospitals and clinics: hospital suppliers, a niche industry unto itself. Thus a plan for new revenue was hatched: sell a hospital supplier lead list. But it wasn’t until we started to write about this offer – by creating ads and a landing page – that the strategy crystalized: rather than try to act like a typical lead prospecting database, act like anything but.  This informed the design and delivery of the product itself. The high-level strategy for the new product was: embrace your strengths and the competition’s weaknesses. But we didn’t know why until we wrote sales copy.