Most businesses start writing copy before they’ve figured out what they’re trying to say. Then they wonder why nothing lands.

They have a website to fill, a pitch to prepare, a campaign to launch – so they start writing. Headlines, taglines, product descriptions, social posts. Words everywhere. But without a strategy underneath, those words aren’t doing much. They’re not wrong, exactly. They’re just not anchored in anything.

Messaging strategy is the anchor. It’s the toolkit of words, phrases, and ideas – built from your brand strategy – that makes sure what you say is consistent, distinctive, and actually connects with the people you're trying to reach.

Without it, you get noise. With it, you get cut-through.

Messaging starts with strategy, not copy

If your brand strategy is clear – your positioning, purpose, principles, personality – then messaging becomes a question of expression. How do we say what we already know to be true?

If it’s not clear, no amount of good writing will fix it. You’ll produce beautiful copy that doesn’t land because there's nothing holding it together. Different people in the organisation will say different things. Your website will tell one story, your sales team another, your recruitment ads a third. Not because anyone’s doing it wrong – but because nobody’s defined what right looks like.

So before you write a word of messaging, you need answers to the foundations: what makes us different, why we exist, what we believe, how we show up. That’s the work that gives messaging its spine.

The components of a messaging toolkit

The terminology here can be confusing – and honestly, experts don't always agree on specific meanings. But what you call each tool matters less than having it and using it consistently.

Here’s what I typically build with clients:

Your positioning and proposition – your place in the market and your promise to customers

Positioning is where messaging meets strategy most directly. It’s how you’re perceived relative to the alternatives – the space you occupy in people's minds. And your value proposition is the promise that stakes out that position: what you’ll do for customers, how you’ll make their lives better. And, why they should choose you.

This has to hinge on something genuinely distinctive. Not a claim anyone could make – something that’s yours.

To illustrate, let’s take an example everyone will recognise.

Ryanair’s positioning is clear: the low-cost option. No frills, no pretence – get there cheaply and on time. Everything in their messaging reinforces that position.

By contrast, BA occupies different ground entirely. ‘To Fly. To Serve.’ – a promise that’s been with them in various forms since the 1920s. Not luxury exactly, but a standard. A commitment. It says: we take this seriously, and so should you. That promise has been tested and stretched over decades, and it still holds – because it’s rooted in something genuine about who they are.

Same industry. Overlapping routes. Completely different positioning and completely different promises. And each one only works because there's a clear strategy underneath it.

Your proposition tells a potential customer why you, above all others. To get it right you have to understand your customer deeply. What they value. What frustrates them. What they’re comparing you against. Do the work. This is the launchpad for everything else.

Your purpose – the ‘why’

This is the core of everything. Why your business exists, beyond making money. Every decision you make should be guided by this, and it serves as the starting point for everything else in your messaging.

Purpose can be lofty or pragmatic. Both work (as long as it’s true).

Ryanair’s mission is clear and functional: to offer customers the lowest possible prices and the best possible service. There’s no poetry in it. There doesn’t need to be – it’s honest to a fault about what they're for. BA’s purpose runs deeper than their proposition – it’s bound up in national identity, in the idea that a great airline is something a country should have and maintain. A sense of duty, responsibility and heritage informs everything, even if rarely stated explicitly.

The key is to discover what really drives you as a business. By finding that essential truth – why you care – you reveal why others should care.

Your narrative – What’s the story

This is the story you tell about your brand. Not a slogan or a tagline – the deeper thread that runs through how you communicate. Maybe it’s why you started. What you set out to change. What you believe about your industry that others don’t.

Ryanair's story is disruption and democratisation – making flying accessible to everyone. It’s a challenger narrative: we took on the establishment and won. BA’s narrative is heritage and continuity – a national carrier that's evolved through decades of change while maintaining a standard. The antithesis of a disruptor story. It's a story about endurance, earning your trust over time.

Both are authentic. Both give every piece of communication a through-line. But they lead to completely different messaging – because the stories are different.

Your founding story, the customer need you spotted, your deeper purpose – these can all spark the narrative. It’s distinct from your messaging but intimately connected to it. The most successful brands have a clear narrative thread that supports rather than competes with their core messages.

Your message pillars – the structure

Only when the above is clear are you ready to build out your message pillars. These are the categories that organise everything you need to say – built around your customer’s needs and the things they care about.

Think of pillars as containers. (In fact, I often call them buckets, but that’s very unglamorous. Let’s stay classy). Each one holds a cluster of messages that address a specific need or concern. Used consistently across platforms, they build familiarity and trust. Your website, your pitches, your social content, your recruitment material – all drawing from the same toolkit, all reinforcing the same ideas.

The discipline here is focus. I promise, you will get bored of your messaging long before your audience has registered it. Remember, you are not the audience. Repetition and variation of consistent messages is how associations get built in people's minds.

Your tone – the personality

How you say it matters as much as what you say. Your tone is the expression of your brand's personality – and it should be as distinctive and consistent as your visual identity.

Ryanair’s tone is informal, direct, and sometimes downright cheeky. They’ll mock competitors (even customers) on social media, use tabloid-style headlines, lean into the controversy. BA is composed. Understated. Quietly confident – the kind of voice that doesn’t need to shout because it believes you already know who they are. Think of their ‘A British Original’ campaign: warm, specific, human – never trying too hard.

That recognisability is a valuable asset. It’s built not by accident but by defining a few clear principles about how the brand should sound, then applying them through everything you communicate. I’ve written more about this in Brand tone of voice – the short version is that tone flows from strategy, not from a copywriter’s instinct.

What happens when this works

When messaging strategy is in place, everything gets easier. Your marketing team has a toolkit to draw from instead of reinventing the wheel every campaign. Sales can articulate what you do clearly and consistently. Your website tells a coherent story. New hires understand how the brand speaks. Partners and agencies can create work that sounds like you without needing you in the room.

And externally, consistency builds trust. People start to recognise not just your logo but your voice, your way of framing things, your point of view. That's how messaging creates brand value over time – not through any single brilliant headline, but through the steady accumulation of clear, consistent, distinctive communication.

What happens when it doesn’t exist

You’ve seen this. Everyone has. The company whose website says one thing, whose sales team says another, whose CEO tells a different story at every conference. Not because anyone’s incompetent – because nobody’s defined the messaging strategy.

Or the business that rewrites its website every eighteen months because ‘it's not working.’ It’s not working because the words keep changing and nothing has time to build. The problem isn’t the copy. It’s the lack of strategy underpinning it.

Or the brand that sounds exactly like every competitor in its sector. Same language, same claims, same tone. Not because they’re copying – because without a messaging strategy rooted in a distinctive brand strategy, everyone defaults to the same category conventions.

The relationship between messaging and strategy

Messaging without strategy is just words. Strategy without messaging stays trapped in a PowerPoint.

The two are sequential. Strategy defines what you stand for – your positioning, purpose, principles, personality. Messaging translates that into language people can use to cut through and connect with customer’s real needs. One informs the other. And when they work together, your brand has both substance and voice.

Some clients come to me with strategy already in place – solid foundations from internal work or another consultancy. In those cases, we start with messaging. Others need the strategy work first. Either way, the principle is the same: get clear on what you’re trying to say before you start saying it.

It sounds obvious. But it’s remarkable how often the order gets reversed.*

*PS: It is a full-time job, getting this right. Mine, as it happens.

If you need help building a messaging strategy – or figuring out whether you need to define your strategy first – let’s talk.

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