Short lists of concise claims
It is often necessary to produce a short list of concise claims. A large fraction of all PowerPoint slides fit that model. So does the list of news in, for example, a typical product press release.
Making such lists is hard, for at least three unavoidable reasons:
- Individual claims should be concise, clear, credible and compelling. This is a very tough standard to meet.
- Ideally, lists of claims would both be fairly complete and tell a coherent story. That’s a difficult challenge as well.
- Different parts of your audience respond well to different things. No one set of words will please, interest or convince everybody.
Even so, many claims lists are yet worse than they need to be.
To create or improve a claims list, it helps to establish goals by asking
- “Who are we trying to persuade …
- … of what?”
and also to check resources by assessing:
- “What proof points do we have to support our case?”
In the case of a product upgrade, answers often resemble:
- (Major upgrades only) It introduces some features that we hope prospects and influencers will believe are important, unique reasons to buy from us.
- (Most upgrades, major and minor alike) It adds some feature catch-up and Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole that we hope will make more conservative prospects find it newly OK to buy from us.
- (Sometimes) In particular, we added features to obviate concerns that previously were keeping us out of certain market segments.
- (Always) While we’re at it, we’d like to communicate some general validation to make prospects and influencers take us more seriously.
- (Too rarely) We actually got approval for some impressive new customer success stories!
- (Always) We want to remind all our audiences that in general we’re always making progress.
So my advice for product-upgrade press releases commonly starts:
- Organize your product-upgrade specifics according to which buying segment will care.
- For each segment, try to mention several different features.
- Make the best sales-momentum claims you can.
My advice for more general collateral, such a website and slide decks, often starts similarly, except that there’s more emphasis on saying one group of things to appeal to techies, and another group of things directed at line-of-business buyers. And so we’re back to what’s my usual advice anyway — tell several good stories, and just make sure they don’t contradict each other.
Better organization, however, only fixes part of the problem; the individual claims often need a lot of work as well. Common failings include (and these overlap):
- Messages that are unclear.
- Messages that just say what many other companies are saying.
- Messages that aren’t supported by facts.
- “Top-level” messages that only a few people will ever care about.
- Claims of “We don’t have Drawback X”, when people don’t know why they should have feared you would have Drawback X.
- Messages that emphasize the drawbacks you don’t have, rather than the beneficial features that you do.
Simplifying that list of concerns leads to a three-item checklist:
- Clear? If people struggle to guess what you mean by something, there’s little benefit to you in saying it.
- Compelling? Different messages for different audiences even aside, there are some claims that almost nobody will find impressive.
- Credible? Many otherwise-impressive marketing claims cause immediate skepticism.
While it’s not always the best approach, I do have a technique that can sometimes address failings in any of those criteria — the two-clause claim. It has at least two major forms:
- Good thing X — without bad thing Y.
- Good thing X — because of technical superiority Z.
Let me illustrate via some dummy examples.
- “Pulls together all your information — without ETL.”
- The “without ETL” clause adds clarity to “Pulls together all your information”, because it indicates the kinds of databases encompassed by “all”.
- Conversely, the “… all your information” clause adds significance to the “no ETL” claim, which is almost meaningless on its own, given how many vendors are making it right now.
- “Improves campaign response — by analyzing all your information.”
- The first clause on its own can be claimed by anybody; the second clause adds credibility by claiming a secret sauce.
- The second clause on its own can mean anything; the first clause adds clarity by indicating this is about predictive analytics.
- “Fastest product in its class, due to our patented frombilization algorithm”.
- The second clause of course means nothing on its own, but the first explains what this unique technology is good for.
- The first clause is hard to take seriously — unless there’s something like the second clause to support it.
In essence, I’m suggesting that every claim should tell a mini-story of its own.
Related links
- Last year, I summarized some principles of enterprise messaging. This post builds on those, within the limitation that nothing concise is ever precise.
- Two books have influenced my thoughts on business writing above all others. One, of course, is Strunk & White. The other is The Pyramid Principle. I actually took a short class from its author Barbara Minto, but I don’t recall it as offering anything the book’s best few pages didn’t also cover.
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