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Jenny ScribaniAligning brand messaging for a variety of customer segments across a number of communications channels is a complex endeavor.
Jenny Scribani has developed a messaging framework that streamlines the process of communicating brand messaging to colleagues across a variety of content practices, letting them focus on the task at hand.
We talked about:
- her prior work at Shopify and many other companies
- an overview of a messaging framework that she has developed
- the principle of decoupling messaging principles from their expression
- the way she balances crafting core messages with the need for channel-specific presentation needs
- the axes in her messaging framework grid: brand pillars and audience segmentation
- how the modular nature of the content in her messaging framework makes it easy to share and update
- how her experiences teaching teenagers has helped her develop her framework
- some of the benefits of her framework: onboarding contractors, scaling up, updating and improving the system, keeping teams motivated, aligning efforts to C-suite business goals, etc.
- the process she uses to build the framework
- how she helps colleagues use the framework
- how her framework helps teams align content around brand considerations
- a backbone analogy on which she hangs her framework
Jenny’s bio
Jenny is a design-thinking UX and content design leader with more than a decade of experience helping brands shape compelling stories and messaging strategies. Fuelled by coffee and a relentless commitment to the Oxford comma, she spends her time crafting content strategies, coaching aspiring writers, and waxing lyrical on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to the virtues of Hufflepuffs. Originally from Cape Town, you can find her hunting for the best coffee in Vancouver.
Connect with Jenny online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 162. When you’re trying to cohesively and consistently present a brand’s image to the world, you have a lot to think about – customer segmentation and brand values heading up a long list of considerations. Jenny Scribani has developed a messaging framework that helps writers and strategists across a number of different content practices stay focused on the overarching brand message, even as they address specific audience segments via specific communications channels.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 162 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to welcome to the show Jenny Scribani. Jenny is an independent content consultant and a messaging expert. She’s based in Vancouver, Canada. Welcome, Jenny. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Jenny::
Hi. Yeah, thank you for having me. So yes, I live in Vancouver, but if anybody’s wondering, this is an accent from Cape Town. I moved here about five years ago. I’m a former journalist. I started off my career working in documentaries, and I spent some time in B2B sales. Then I spent a number of years in the trenches teaching Shakespeare to high schoolers as an English teacher before I wandered my way back into content about six years ago. So I worked across marketing and product, across UX and SEO, so probably about 11 years working in content development in one capacity or another. But most recently I was at Shopify. I was their lead content designer on the rebrand and the website overhaul. So I built out their messaging strategy, redesigned their core pages with our product design team, and built a new design system from the ground up. And now I’m here.
Larry:
That’s a lot, which is very typical of content people. We’re all overachievers. So thanks for repping the profession properly. Hey, you just mentioned that one of your things at Shopify was working on the messaging framework. And the way we connected, I want to give a shout-out to Cat Overman down in Seattle. I was asking her about suggestions for guests for the show, and your name jumped to her mind. She goes, “Oh, you got to talk to Jenny about this messaging framework of hers.”
Jenny::
That’s so cool.
Larry:
So you most recently did it, it sounds like, at Shopify. Can you tell me just sort of a quick overview of the framework and then we’ll go into the details of it?
Jenny::
Yeah, of course. So I have worked on a number of different messaging frameworks over the years. So I’ve kind of implemented this system at a few different companies, Shopify most recently. But I sort of break down messaging in a slightly different way. The problem that I’ve experienced with messaging guides is they’re very, very detailed, all the way from high level ideas like branding down to comma placement. And it’s amazing because, as content designers, we know how to reduce cognitive load, except when it comes to our own internal documentation. So I just looked at this information and I thought, “Okay, we have all this conceptual info, and then we have all this detailed info on execution, but that’s really siloed because the rules of engagement, the execution rules, are so different.”
Jenny::
Depending on if you’re looking at social, or you’re looking at an admin UI, or you’re talking about traditional marketing, the rules that you can break are different, but the thing that’s common to every crafter is the message that we’re trying to share and who we’re trying to share it with. So I designed a system that breaks down the information that’s common to all crafters, and my theory is you need to decouple messaging principles from execution. So everything for me is, “What are the brand pillars? What are we talking about as a brand, and how do I break that down by audience segment so that I can really dig into how does each audience segment approach and interact with our brand?” And that helps with a number of different things with getting messaging off the ground. But as content design, what I love is it adds a lot of data-driven heft to what we do as content designers so that we can put business sense behind what we do.
Larry:
I love that. And now I’m wishing we’d done this a month or two ago, because one of the other things I do is organize conferences, and I just helped organize Decoupled Days last month, which was about decoupled more about the technical architecture. But I think this concept of decoupling the messaging, having an architecture that decouples channel presentation from the overarching messaging thing, and that sounds also very strategic. So this is definitely in the realm of content strategy. So you’ve made the cut, you’re welcome to the show now-
Jenny::
Yay.
Larry:
So decoupling has some hazards; that you need to recouple it at some point and make sure that that messaging intent is conveyed. How do you stitch it all together?
Jenny::
For me, if we’re going to have a branding guide, we tend towards silos, and I think actually the branding needs to be common to everybody who’s creating external content, because whether you have eight people or 200 people crafting content, it’s going to the same user, and they need to not feel confused by what we’re sending out. So I feel really that our messaging needs to be something that goes across everyone. But then within each specialization, within each surface, sometimes you’re bound by best practices, or you’re bound by character counts. There’s different rules you can break on a UI than what you can break on socials. So there’s different things, but we’re still talking to people.
Jenny::
So I leave a lot of the more technical character count stuff within each surface area, within each specialization, because those crafters know best how to break their own rules. And then I just look at what are the two things, the brand pillars and the audience segmentation. And how I tend to do that, I think of it like a matrix. So you have your two axes. On one axis, you have all of your principles, and that’s stuff like key drive. Those are things that don’t change very often. They’re aspects of you as a company, what are you selling and what is the value prop behind it? And it’s things like what are the key drivers, what are the business pain points, what are the actual products that we have and how we’re trying to communicate them? And then on the other axis, I have each of our audience segments and digging into those pain points, how they interact with our value props, what proof points they’re most responsive to, and competitive advantage, things like that.
Jenny::
Because it helps you gain a really detailed deep dive into that audience segment and all the data we have about how they interact with us, because we have all of that data. I mean, it’s coming in from market research, from brand health studies, from our customer service teams. We have a lot of information about each audience segment, but we aren’t collating it in a way that’s easy to disseminate with people. So I always put it into kind of a chart format so that we have a tool, not a manifesto, and we have these little bits of information that you can pull out a really detailed idea of, “I know exactly what this audience thinks about our brand.”
Jenny::
Now, where this kind of hits the road is when you’re dealing with a targeted experience. I mean, I can have a crafter come in and say to them, “I need you to create two versions of this, one for early stage and one for mid,” and they can look at my guide and know within 20 minutes how to distinguish the messaging between those two in a really tight way. Let’s take Shopify, for example. One of Shopify’s biggest benefits is you can manage your entire business from one dashboard. You can go into the admin and you can run your entire business from one place. Now that is a huge Shopify value prop, but it means something completely different if you are an early-stage entrepreneur, if you are a small to medium business, or if you’re an enterprise client. It’s the same value prop, but the value that they place on it is completely different and you need a different tone to be able to talk about it.
Jenny::
So having that knowledge just in a format like a chart where that can be easily shared with every crafter who needs to execute it, and it can be updated really easily because it’s not a 10-page document. It’s little modules of information that can be updated as we get new data and new messaging strategies in. And it becomes a really great way to collate all of that brand and audience information and share it with every crafter so that as we’re out crafting great content for whatever surface we’re working on, we’re still talking to the same audience, and we’re still giving them a consistent message to tell the story of our brand.
Larry:
Right. My current title is Omnichannel Service Designer, and so I think about this from a slightly different perspective as I do more structuring content and ascribing metadata to it so you can build content experiences. I can totally picture working with somebody like you to say, “Oh, that’s what this segment needs.” But one thing you said as you were describing that, you described it as two-by-two grid of the principles and the brand and stuff down one side and the audience segments on the other. But as you were talking about different kinds of levels of folks coming in, I’m wondering if there’s a Z-axis in that chart? Or have I just complicated your messaging framework by adding, because it seems like you’re saying that the dashboard is used differently by maybe stage or type of business? Is this sort of just a multidimensional thing that you simplified for teaching purposes down to two dimensions or…
Jenny::
Oh, well, I think two things. I do actually think that a lot of this comes from my experience as a teacher, because I was one adult trying to wrangle 100 incredible teenagers, who I love, and I have to say that because they’ll all listen to this at some point, and I had to find a way to get all of them the information they needed so they could be independently successful without me going insane. So creating systems that help people be independently successful and know where to get the information they need to do what they do best, that is something that I feel really strongly about. That’s my approach to structure.
Jenny::
But also just to touch on what you were saying about the two axes. So one thing is helpful, on the one end of that axis is all those things that are common to the company. But if we think about it as columns and rows, the rows are all the things that are useful to the company and how we talk about the brand, but then there’s a column for each audience segment, so that that can be pulled out and they can be compared.
Jenny::
So, with the one company I worked at, we had probably eight different columns so that you had really tight distinctions of, “How does this audience versus this audience versus this audience experience our brand, and what insights can we draw from what they’re converting on?” Because we had that data, it just wasn’t available to anyone. And because I kept it short and sweet, it was easy to keep updating over time. So it helped to really equip all of my crafters that I’d bring in as well, as contractors, to teach them about a brand in a short time.
Larry:
Yeah. You just pointed out one real super-practical benefit of this kind of framework, is that kind of thing, onboarding contractors. Were there other benefits you’ve discovered? You developed it for addressing market segments more efficiently? Have other benefits unfolded as you’ve used it?
Jenny::
Yeah. I think one thing that we found, it’s infinitely scalable, because if you add new aspects of what you’re digging into as a brand or a new product line, you just add another row to your sheet, and you add in, “Okay, this is a new product offering, this is how it’s met by all the different audience segments. Let’s dig into it.” Or if you start targeting a different audience segment, you just add another row, and you add in that information. And it’s scalable, expandable and contractable as you need to, so it was really easy to streamline updates over time. And the information kind of ended up being owned by our data team and our product marketing team, and they could continue putting in updates that could then be accessed by all of our crafters.
Jenny::
So it took a lot of that guesswork out of it. It gave back that opportunity cost where people are spending so much time just trying to track down the right information they need to just do their jobs. I found that it’s helped a lot with keeping my teams connected as well, because it breaks down silos, because it’s focusing on the information that’s common to all crafts. There’s none of this going back and forth and updating when there’s new algorithm info that comes out, or focusing on the nitty-gritty of language and punctuation things that maybe are different from craft to craft.
Jenny::
And then, just as a content designer and somebody who cares a lot about the strategy side of content design, I found that it added a lot of weight to content decisions because I was able to tie it to data and to tie it to brand and audience goals and business goals. And I could go into meetings with my VPs or my C-suite, and I could confidently say to them, “This is a call that I think we should make on a content decision, and these are the data points of why, because this is attached to this and this and this about our audience and about our brand, and this is how I’m drawing a thread from our business goal to this audience member and making those business decisions.”
Jenny::
So an example, when we were building the Shopify page, there was one particular product that came out halfway through our design process. And it was very new, it was exciting, so of course the urge is, “Let’s put it on the front page. Everybody needs to see this.” It was something that was, what I would call, emerging. It was a little bit advanced. It was a technology that not everybody was super comfortable with yet, but it was also very exciting. So you want it to be accessible, but we could see that it is something, we had the data to show, the main audience that we’re targeting for the website doesn’t engage with this particular technology. It’s something they still find later-stage, it’s a little bit overwhelming. And I was able to go forward and say, “My feeling is that this is adding cognitive overwhelm to the homepage. It’s going to work against us. My recommendation is to put it one click away from the homepage,” because I had a progressive disclosure strategy of how we were putting those things in place.
Jenny::
So you’ll find that technology on the website and the redesigned pages, but it’s one click away from the homepage. Because we could see that this audience is not going to respond well, “Let’s move it down so that it’s not overwhelming for them, because they have enough to figure out as it is.” And that’s really the benefit that I’ve just found. It gives me a data-driven background to make creative decisions. And it also tells me where I can push the envelope to drive innovative new ways to deliver my message. Because the message stays true, but then I can push the boundaries with how I communicate it to my audience because I understand them.
Larry:
Right. Hey, and I realize we kind of jumped into what the framework is, how it works, and everything you said has made perfect sense, but a couple of things have come up that make me want to back out of it a little bit. When you talk a lot about data and how data-informed this is, and that’s gold in this day and age because we have so much data at our disposal that we can gather, but also just in general, your discovery process to populate those rows and columns in that table of the framework, can you talk a little bit about how… You’re sitting there with a blank spreadsheet, starting one of these things. You don’t just start filling it in; you do some kind of research, I’m assuming, right?
Jenny::
Yes. Yeah. I am a fan of building really strong relationships with your other teams. I have built really good relationships with my data teams, with my product marketers, with SEO teams as well because they have great insights to offer and we’re all trying to win the attention of the same people. So I go and I build those relationships with people who are the owners of the data, and then I go and I pull together as much research as I can to then put it into this modular format.
Jenny::
And because I’ve built this at so many different companies, I have the ability to bring this and show them an example, and then I can pull out a lot of that. So I can glance at a sheet here and I have data around which products this audience is converting on versus this one. I have a sense of this is the plan share versus this audience segment. I know how the company is spread across these segments. And I’ve just gathered that information by digging into the people in my company who own the data and know it best, and then I can put it into a format that saves them some time in disseminating that info to all the crafters.
Larry:
And like you said earlier, and then when somebody asks your rationale for the decision, you’ve got boom, boom, boom, data, data, data, interview, interview, interview.
Jenny::
Yeah.
Larry:
Somehow something you just said triggered this memory… Anyhow, I’m just going to ask the question, you talked a couple of times earlier about the… Oh, I know, it was when you were talking about the silo, from the messaging architecture down to comma placement decisions. And you’ve also mentioned a couple of times that each kind of communication channel or market segment, you’re going to speak a little bit differently to them. There’s good reasons for that. One of the big overarching things in brand guidance and that kind of thing, like voice and tone guidance and other kinds of guidance, is that sort of part of this messaging framework, or are you more aligning that with other documentation and guidance like that?
Jenny::
Do you mean how are those more technical pieces showing up in the process?
Larry:
Yeah, I guess. And actually the bigger question, the other thing I was going to ask in a minute, but I’ll ask now, you’ve mentioned a few times this framework is a great way to communicate with other stakeholders in the system. I assume that’s a cell in the table, like, “Here’s the market segment you’re addressing, and here’s the brand thing we’re trying to impart here. Here’s how you do that.” And I’m just wondering, are you just sharing the framework with them, or is this an internal thing that you use, and then you have different communication techniques for dealing with your coworkers?
Jenny::
Oh, yeah. So typically what will happen as a framework, so sometimes it’s been created as an Excel sheet. I’ve actually been part of a team before that also wove in some other interactive elements to it so that we could also tie in, let’s say, testimonials for each audience segment, and tie in experiment results from each segment so that people across the company could see what was working well and not working well with different segments. But it’s all held in one central place. And then, there’s a handful of teams who are able to update the information as new research comes in, but it’s accessible by every team that’s creating outward-facing content.
Jenny::
And then with those more technical pieces… And I’ll tell you where part of this came from back in the day when I first came up with this, is I was staring down a brand book that needed to be updated. And as I dug into it, I saw the guidelines in here are all over the place because there’s certain things that are, “Here’s a list of character counts. This character count, it applies to socials, but not to the admin UI.” Or, “These grammar rules are very important for this surface, but they can be broken over here.” Or, “These color issues actually only apply to this team, but not to this team.” And I just found this document was 10 pages long, and it was completely unusable because it had so much information that was specific to team by team, but it wasn’t focusing on the pieces that were common to everybody and making them easy to parse.
Jenny::
So I tend to set up my teams as each team will have their own little set of technical guidelines because the technical guidelines for the TB team will be different to socials, will be different to the UI. And they have their technical details, and that’s informed by different things as well. That’s a little bit best practices, it’s a little bit what the platform is telling you, it’s a little bit pressing the crafters that you have in there to know what works and what doesn’t, because that’s why we hire good people, and they kind of have things in their groups that manage how they execute within their teams.
Jenny::
And then, this cross-org messaging strategy just focuses on those pieces that are common to everyone. And then, that’s accessible for everybody, so they can actually go into it and they have updates. So I typically have it hosted on a central repository where people can see when the last updated info was. We’ll send out updates on Slack as we update it as well to let people know, “Hey, we’ve incorporated new data guidance into the system.” And then, when people are going in, and like, “Oh wait, I need to create an experience for a small to medium business user. However do I do that?” I can go and look at this information.
Jenny::
And it’s not very much information. I mean, it’s a lot of information. What I mean is that it’s written in short form to make it easy to digest. And they can look at it and see, “Okay, wait a second, they are interacting with these five products. That’s what they’re converting on right now. I know what pain points they’re dealing with and what competitors we’re facing down with this particular product. I know how to write something that’s compelling and that will meet the need and tell the story that that user is looking for at this time.”
Larry:
Perfect. Yeah, I phrased the question kind of awkwardly, but you answered it really eloquently, so it all balances out. Hey, but one thing – and my intent in asking that was about that execution part of it. How does this framework help people get their job done? And you just explained that, but I’m also curious about governance around this. Does that ever come up? Because that’s often a concern of brand folks is, “How well is our brand being portrayed across all these experiences?” You’re nodding your head-
Jenny::
Definitely. And I do come up against that often, and I think it’s extremely fair, to be honest, and I think that’s why a tool like this is so important. I’m going to explain this with an anecdote and then kind of flesh that out, but I went into a meeting with somebody who was one of the leads of brand, and I was talking to her about this idea when I was first setting it up at a company. And she came to the meeting prepped with a list of documents and things that she wanted to share with me to say, “This is how you represent the brand.” And I said to her, “That’s awesome. Here’s all this data that I can put into my framework, but let me explain the framework to you.” And she said to me, “If you manage to do this, I will give you a Nobel Prize for all the time that you were saving me in my day.”
Jenny::
And that was the thing, is tools like this, if you have the governance for the people who hold the data, people like the brand leads and the product leads, and the actual data team who is hired to do that market research and the UX research, you have those teams and the people who are the holders of the data, you give them a format from which they can disseminate it to everybody. It stays centralized and they can kind of keep that control over it, but still, you can access it from everybody else to create. And that is actually helping to keep the brand focused. Because as much as you’re innovating in different parts of the company, you’re all speaking to the same messaging because it speaks back to the same kind of core set of values of, “This is how we talk about our brand to this audience.”
Jenny::
And so I find there’s very few people who have the ability to update it. It’s the people who own the data, as they should because they are the best equipped. That’s why we hire them, to know that data. And then, it’s an easy way for them to control it and update it as new information comes in, but then it’s accessed by people who need to then turn that into communication about the brand. And I find by taking out that middleman step, I find I get a lot of content that is actually focused on the same kind of messaging. It’s improving what our audience is getting because we’re creating a cohesive message that everybody can understand, and it cuts off those meetings of somebody trying to say, “Hey, do you know where I can find information about these people?”
Larry:
Yeah. That was the real crux of my question because it’s often the informal networks and the chats in the coffee room where you get that information, but it seems like this is a better source than those kinds of conversations.
Jenny::
Yeah, it’s opportunity cost, right? I mean, all the time that we put in trying to just find that information and rebuilding these sheets because we’re writing 10-page documents, which are not easy to update as new data comes in. So they inevitably go out of date within a year or so, if not less, and then you’re dedicating time to not only rebuilding this thing but also trying to find the information in the interim. So I was like, “How do we cut that opportunity cost so that we can all just do what we do best, which is creating compelling stories for our users?”
Larry:
And you’re kind of updating that one cell at a time in that framework, it sounds like? Yeah, which is a lot more manageable.
Jenny::
Yeah.
Larry:
Hey, Jenny, I can’t believe it, we’re already coming up close to time, but I always like to ask before we wrap, Is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation or that’s just on your mind about crafting a messaging architecture in a framework that you want to share with folks?
Jenny::
Yeah, I think something we’ve touched on a little bit is kind of how I think about that structure and about disseminating information. And so, if you’ll allow me, this is going to be my teacher brain coming into the chat, but using a really cheesy analogy? But a lot of companies, and rightfully so, are very process shy. And I think that ends up you don’t want to have too much information where you are stifling people’s creativity, but the opposite can also be true where you don’t have enough information to allow people to do their jobs.
Jenny::
So I think of structures and processes like a skeleton. You have the arms and the legs, all the limbs who are all doing their things independently, like different teams within your company or different crafters on your team, but they still need a backbone to keep everybody aligned. And that backbone is, “What information do we need? Where do we put the stuff that we make? Where do I find the rules of engagement? Where do I find my branding info?” And that is stuff that people should be able to find independently. Nobody should ever be delayed on their work because I’m sick or I’m too busy to reply to their Slack.
Jenny::
So I’m a big fan of having all that information central and having a process in place that clears roadblocks for people. And that’s that backbone that gives everybody the ability to function independently. And so that backbone is to clear roadblocks and make things efficient, not a rod to beat somebody’s creativity out of them. So when people are coming up with structures and plans to help enable their team, I’m always like, “What is the least amount of information that you can put into this to just unlock for people so that they can then do what they do best, which is what you hired them to do in the first place?” And I think that sets a lot of freedom for people. It just sets people up for success and sets your team up for success.
Larry:
And it sounds like this would actually facilitate that. Well, that’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jenny. Oh, hey, one very last thing – what’s the best way for folks to stay in touch if they want to follow online or connect with you?
Jenny::
Yeah, I’m probably most active on LinkedIn, and then people can find me at my website, jennyscribani.com. That’s where I touch base with people for public speaking and for consulting and that kind of work. I am occasionally on the platform formerly known as Twitter, as Jenny:, but not spending quite as much time there these days. But people can track me down on LinkedIn and my website.
Larry:
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jenny.
Jenny::
Yeah, thank you, Larry. So nice to chat to you.
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