🚰 Consistency is plumbing

The first thing I do on a messaging project is open several browser tabs.

The homepage. The sales one-pager. The LinkedIn company page.

I read them side by side and note how each describes the company. Three descriptions, each describing a slightly different company. Which is the real one?

None of them is wrong, per se, and nobody involved was careless. Each of those pieces was written from someone’s memory of what the brand stands for, and memory is a lossy format. Ten people on the team would hold ten slightly different recollections, all sincere… and a few degrees off.

Run that for a year, and the message drift becomes visible from space.

Why this issue never makes the roadmap

Susan Leigh Star spent her career studying infrastructure, and she has a line I love to quote: “the normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks.” That is, nobody thinks about it at all, until it’s no longer working, usually in a visibly catastrophic manner.

But message drift never “breaks.” Not like a collapsed bridge or sunk asphalt, anyway. No customer writes in to point out that your one-pager and your homepage sound slightly confusing when put next to each other. So it loses during prioritization to the things that visibly break, quarter after quarter.

When teams do get to it, the answer usually takes one of two forms. Everyone agrees to be more careful. Or somebody commissions a brand guidelines document, which is often genuinely excellent, and which nobody opens twice.

Both answers ask a person to remember to go and look something up. And no one (me included) does it with their back against a deadline, writing a landing page at 8 PM.

You already solved this for the logo

Most companies have cracked this exact problem once already, on the visual side.

It’s called a design system. The design guidelines get built into a shared library of ready-made pieces: buttons, headings, form fields, spacing, the lot. Designers and developers pull from that library, and the right colors and proportions come along automatically. Nobody looks up hex values.

That’s what a solved consistency problem looks like. The standard sits directly in the path of the work, so following it costs less than ignoring it.

Your messaging rarely gets that treatment yet. But it could.

Same flavor, different words

First, let’s tackle a myth: most people hear “messaging consistency” and picture the same sentence pasted onto every surface. That’s how a brand ends up sounding like a toddler reciting: they repeat a line they’ve been taught and don’t yet believe. Technically on-message, and audibly hollow.

So what goes in the messaging library?

The version that works is to have each idea restated in the brand’s own words, with phrasing variations to use when needed.

Here’s what that looks like on my site. My homepage says “I get complex brands clear on what they stand for and carry it through everything they publish.” My services page says “clear, consistent, carried through your content.” My LinkedIn headline says something close, and shorter. My About page says it in first person, at length. Four surfaces, covering one idea, with different text that still has the same flavor.

That works because there’s a document underneath making the decisions. A messaging framework is where you settle what you stand for and how you say it, once. Then nobody writing a page has to invent it with a deadline looming.

My messaging framework features copy at different lengths (a one-liner, a 50-word version, and a 100-word version), as well as the details that produced it (the category my clients put me in, the alternatives they’re weighing, the few ways I can say I’m better, with proof attached).

Content strategist Margot Bloomstein has been calling this a message architecture since 2012, comfortably predating every AI writing tool you’re currently being pitched. But with the rise of AI, having an easily accessible document like this gets more important.

Where it lives and which parts I’m fussy about

I don’t really care what that messaging architecture looks like. It can be a document. A slide deck. A mood board on your marketing room wall, even, as long as everyone in that room agrees what it means.

Here’s where I do get fussy. The moment it needs to travel past the people who made it, format starts to matter. It needs to be clear enough and specific enough to hand to a freelancer starting Monday, or to an AI.

That translation is the entire job of a “knowledge block:” the core information, written down in a form a person or a machine can load before it writes for you.

Those files can live wherever your team will actually go. A shared Drive folder is fine. A GitHub repository is better for AI use cases. As Emily Kramer puts it, a shared repo means every improvement to the architecture shows up in everyone’s next task run.

And that “improvement” part highlights that whatever you write is a working version. Plan to revise it. My own website sat on stale messaging for seven years, so I’d rather you didn’t follow my example there.

***

Go back to those browser tabs we started with. Whether they line up has little to do with how much anyone cared, and everything to do with whether there was something to work from.

So build the something. If you sit down to it this week, one of two things happens:

Option A: you have the answers and this is a simple documenting job. Feel free to use my messaging framework template.

Option B: you can’t answer with reasonable certainty and that’s good to know. Then you collect the language first, and message mining is where I’d start.

Both of those you can do on your own, and plenty of you should. If you’d rather not do it alone, The Positioning Setup runs two weeks from August 24, with me looking at what you produce. You leave with a v1 positioning and a messaging framework with the slots filled in.

The plumbing matters,

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

How to make people care about your startup | Ghostwriter Kristen Lowe sorts founder stories into three types, Problem, Insight and Vision, each earning a different reaction: I identify with you, I trust you, I’d follow you. A great simple structure if you’re building a personal brand as a founder.

Your AI Draft Has No Boring Sentences. That’s the Problem. | Fellow content marketer Ina Toncheva makes a good point about AI’s habit of manufacturing tension. Every sentence fights to be the best one in the paragraph, so none of them get to be the setup. She calls it compression, and there’s a prompt at the end that flags it in your draft without rewriting anything.

Return On Generative Engine Optimization aka The ROI Of GEO & AEO | A great logical case for putting GEO in the same bucket as PR, brand awareness and thought leadership. Its real influence is early in the decision, with knock-on effects on leads, and hard to measure the way you’d measure paid search. I happen to agree. Useful framing if someone is asking you for GEO numbers.

👀 Two for fun

This gallery of very small robots | Matt Dixon’s paintings are the cutest collection of robots I’ve come across in a long time. Go look at those instead of your inbox.

This answer to whether you can hear a shape | Mathematicians asked in 1966 whether you could hear the shape of a drum. Find out for yourself with this interactive demo.

🐈 Weekly cat

The hat is the only thing keeping his mind from being blown.