There’s no small degree of irony to the large degree of ambiguity in the way marketing and communications professionals describe what we do.

‘Messaging’, for my money, is the one of the worst offenders. 

You know when you turn on the TV and you see some glassy-eyed member of the cabinet defending the latest government whatever, or some equally TM Lewin besuited member of the opposition announcing a policy response you know is never going to happen?

And then the next day there’s another suit from the relevant party saying the same thing on a different channel with different words? And then you make the mistake of looking at Twitter, and everyone from each party is basically saying the same thing (ideally with a minimum amount of transparent CTRL+C, CTRL+V)?

That’s message discipline.  The same message, ideally communicated with degrees of elegant variation, thanks to an organisationally accepted comms framework.

And leaving to one side my near-relentless near-nihilism about British Politics, this is a useful gateway for talking about a fundamental part of campaigns and communications that is often accidentally under-discussed.

FWIW, I think a lot of things in the agency-client relationship go under examined because it doesn’t feel good to ask really obvious questions .  I hope we can work to change that, because I really do think it’s the key to doing banging work together. 

You’ll hear politicians described as ‘on message’ or ‘having strayed off message’. It just means they either are or aren’t sticking to their talking points. And this phrase - talking points - is key to thinking about how we use messages, messaging and client facing copy in marketing and campaigns.

I’ll provide some examples below to show the difference between message and copy, but for a brief definition of what we mean by copy: normally persuasive or informational in its intent, copy is written information intended to be read by an audience as part of a comms tactic e.g. an ad, a website, a flyer.

It’s important to note that brand level messages and campaign messages are sometimes the same, but do not have to be.  Specific talking points related to a service or solution, a specific audience or event, a product etc.  would be clearly related to the overall brand messages - but are likely to be more tightly focused.

Either way, messages are talking points.  

These are the things you want to be known for. The topics of conversation your business has a right to talk about, aligned with your brand goals, tone of voice, etc. Having a well defined set of talking points is the foundation for any effective messaging strategy. These talking points need to be messages that connect your brand to your audience in a concise, clear and motivational way.  A good campaign message should create the need for a change in behaviour or circumstance in the recipient.  

Think back to examples of politicians on TV: the repetition of a single message by multiple authors, across multiple platforms is nearly always intended to convince you of something (good or bad, proactive or reactive, empowering or reassuring). It’s most effective when voiced with as much authenticity as an individual can muster. But the underlying theme is tight to the message or talking point.

To frame this in marketing terms, the talking point is the message and the individual politician's articulation is the copy. 

The message is what you say, messaging is how you organise it, and copy is how you say it.

This sets up a trinity of useful working definitions for us: 

Message = what you want to communicate shorn of all needless info and distractions.This is normally 3-5 things for a campaign or brand, but it could be more or fewer. 

Messaging = how you have organised your various messages into a coordinated framework. This is most frequently a ‘messaging house’ but it doesn't have to be. 

Copy = how you are expressing your various messages in a compelling way. 

Here’s a wee example for a fictional brand.

Messages:

Applied innovation

Resilient systems 

Customer centricity 

Copy: (This is all deliberately awful, I promise)

Applied innovation: “Technology based around the way you actually work!”

Resilient systems: “99.9% tech uptime means never ruining your downtime”

Customer centricity: “A dedicated squad of help goons is available 24/7.

To recap: The message is what you say, messaging is how you organise it, and copy is how you say it.

And next time you see some sweaty looking backbencher being wheeled out to defend the indefensible, or the Shadow Secretary for Nonsense Policy decrying the latest govt snafu, remember that somewhere on their laptop is a file titled ‘Messaging deck 2023_v4_final_DO NOT DELETE (1).PDF’