Communication Objectives and Messages
Innovation & New Business Planning - TUHH Institute of Innovation Marketing & Institute of Entrepreneurship, Hamburg · part of my Technology Management MBA · study notes for revision.
The recipients chapter answered the first question of a communication plan: who am I talking to. This chapter takes the next two blocks of the same planning frame, the ones the slides keep showing side by side whenever the section changes: what am I trying to achieve with this group, and what do I therefore say to them. The deck presents the messages first and the objectives afterwards, but for planning I find the reverse order more honest, because the objective is what decides the message. Write the message first and you end up admiring your own product; write the objective first and the message almost falls out of it.
A communication objective in this course is not the sentence we want more sales. It is a statement tied to one named recipient group, placed at one specific point in that group’s buying process, saying what I expect those people to do next, and phrased so that a KPI can tell me afterwards whether it happened. Those are exactly the questions the objectives block on the slide asks, and they have to be answered together, because the same people at a different stage need a completely different objective.
The message is then the part the recipient actually sees. The slides are blunt about what makes one work: it answers the questions running through the recipient’s own head, it talks about the value of a feature rather than the feature, it lets people see the gains and takes away their fear of the pains, and it carries one strong headline that frames everything else, because a pile of good arguments with no frame is just a mess.
1 · The four blocks of a communication plan
Section titled “1 · The four blocks of a communication plan”This is the slide that reappears as a divider all session, so it is worth memorising as one picture. Four blocks, each with its own questions, reading left to right: the recipient defines the objective, and the objective defines the channel and the message.
- Who is my main audience?
- What are their preferences regarding product and service attributes, channels, media and information, and what are their expectations and prior knowledge?
- What is our communication objective, and where in the customer journey are the recipients?
- What do we expect the recipients to do?
- What are the KPIs, and how can we measure them to assess whether the activity succeeded?
- Which channels are most suitable to reach the objectives in these target groups?
- Which combinations or integrations of channels have to be designed?
- What are the key messages that achieve the objectives in the target groups, and what is the hook?
- How can we shape the story to fit each group, and how can we communicate value?
Note that the objectives block already contains the measurement question. In this framework the objective and its KPI are not two separate exercises, they are written in the same breath.
2 · What a communication objective must actually contain
Section titled “2 · What a communication objective must actually contain”Turning that block into something usable means five lines per target group. Left is the question printed on the slide, right is what I have to be able to show my team.
| Question on the slide | What I have to write down |
|---|---|
| What is our communication objective? | One sentence per target group, naming the effect I want in their heads or their behaviour |
| Where in the customer journey are the recipients? | The stage, picked from one of the phase models below, since the stage is what makes the objective realistic |
| What do we expect the recipients to do? | The concrete next action: click, sign up, request a proposal, book a demo, recommend us |
| What are the KPIs of our activities? | The number that has to move if the objective is reached |
| How can we measure the KPIs? | The tool or data source, plus the time window over which I will read it |
Two rules follow, and they are the examinable ones. First, an objective is always stated for a specific recipient group, never for the market in general, because two groups sit at different stages with different prior knowledge. Second, an objective must be measurable, or the last two lines cannot be filled in and there is no way to tell a working campaign from an expensive one. The deck also warns against the lazy version: a venture that goes viral has achieved awareness, not conversion, and expecting awareness to turn into sales by itself is naive. Turning awareness into conversion is a separate objective that has to be planned.
3 · Phase models, part one: the process of adoption, and AIDA
Section titled “3 · Phase models, part one: the process of adoption, and AIDA”To pick a stage I need a phase model, and the slides offer several. The oldest is introduced as the first customer journey model ever developed, the process of adoption from the diffusion literature. It begins with a stimulus and runs through four phases.
Each phase asks for a different objective: awareness and findable information in the knowledge phase, attitude and preference in persuasion and decision, successful use in implementation, since a customer who cannot get the thing working never reaches the end, and re-purchase and upgrade in confirmation. One product, four objectives, four messages. Many phase models have been proposed since, and the slides name AIDA as the most established of them: attention, interest, desire and finally action, where the action step is drawn as the purchase itself. It is the compressed version of the same staircase, which is why it survives.
4 · Phase models, part two: a real kitchen purchase
Section titled “4 · Phase models, part two: a real kitchen purchase”The more instructive slide is a simple customer journey for buying a kitchen, because it puts an emotion beside every step. That is the part I keep forgetting: a stage is not only an activity, it is a mood, and the mood is what the message has to meet.
| Step | What the buyer does | The feeling on the slide | The job for communication |
|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Has just bought a first house and can finally have the kitchen of their dreams | Happy and excited | Be present exactly when the need appears |
| Consideration | Talks to friends who bought a kitchen last year, looks through catalogues | Does not seem impossible any more | Supply easy, borrowable information |
| Consideration | With the new knowledge, browses for kitchen designers in the area | This seems super complicated | Cut the perceived complexity, give orientation |
| Consideration | Visits a store to see real kitchens | Wow, everything looks so nice | Let the product do the emotional work |
| Consideration | Talks to a sales representative, then goes home and searches again | Excuse me, are you sure this is the right price? | Handle the price shock, and be findable a second time |
| Acquisition | A second conversation, with an offer that better suits the financial situation | Still a lot of money, but I will not buy one every week | Reframe the price against the lifetime of the purchase |
| After sales | Construction begins | All these strange people in my house, and the dirt | Manage the dip, set expectations before it happens |
| After sales | The first dinner cooked in the new kitchen | Delight | Ask for the review and the referral at this exact moment |
The whole journey happens in one head over several weeks, and the emotional low point falls after the money has been paid. If my only objective is the purchase, I have no plan at all for the two steps that decide whether this customer ever recommends me.
5 · Phase models, part three: organizational buying and the leads pipeline
Section titled “5 · Phase models, part three: organizational buying and the leads pipeline”For business customers the slides pair two views of the same journey: the buyer’s own purchasing process, and the same movement seen from the supplier’s side as a leads pipeline or customer funnel. They are not two processes, they are two vocabularies for one process, and objectives are normally written in the right-hand one.
- Problem recognition
- Learning about existing offers
- Definition of requirements
- Focusing on the suitable offers
- Requesting and analysing proposals, negotiating
- Selection of the supplier or suppliers
- Traffic
- Leads
- Marketing qualified leads
- Sales qualified leads
- Opportunities
- Customers
This is also what makes the objective measurable almost for free, because pipeline stages are countable: turn 200 marketing qualified leads into 60 sales qualified leads this quarter is a legitimate communication objective, while raise our profile in the industry is not.
The slides then add the complication most plans ignore. Purchasing is not the end of the process, and the after sales phases are extensive and very important. They are drawn differently for the two markets.
| After the purchase | Consumer markets | Business markets |
|---|---|---|
| Next phase | Advocacy and conviction | Referrals |
| Then | Repeated purchase | Volume and line expansion |
| Then | Retargeting | Reacquisition |
Advocacy and conviction links straight back to the recipients chapter, because a convinced customer becomes a recommender and recommenders are the cheapest channel there is. Volume and line expansion is the business version of the same idea: the objective is not a new logo but a larger share of an account I already have.
6 · The journey canvas: one column per stage, seven rows per column
Section titled “6 · The journey canvas: one column per stage, seven rows per column”The tool that pulls all of this together is a canvas with the journey stages as columns and seven rows underneath. Filling the columns left to right is what forces the objective to become stage-specific. The two example columns below are the ones printed on the slide, from the start and from the end of the journey.
| Row of the canvas | Early in the journey | After the purchase |
|---|---|---|
| Customer activities | Recognises a need | Repurchases in the product category |
| Customer goals | Wants to understand his needs | Wants to upgrade the product |
| Emotions and needs | Is overwhelmed by information | Is disappointed or satisfied |
| Channels, instruments, touchpoints | Online video ad | Face to face sales meeting |
| Company goals | Making the customer aware of your brand | Upselling |
| KPIs | Brand awareness ratio, then conversion rate | Churn rate, revenue increase |
| Responsibilities | The SEO and SEA team | In-house sales by telephone, then field sales |
The row I would otherwise skip is responsibilities, and it is the one that makes the plan real, because an objective with no named owner is a wish. Notice also that the channels change completely across the canvas, from a cheap broad video ad at the start to an expensive personal meeting at the end, which is the economics of the funnel in one line.
7 · The funnel view: the objective changes as the funnel narrows
Section titled “7 · The funnel view: the objective changes as the funnel narrows”The last objectives slide compresses everything into three bands and states the rule plainly: the main objectives change along the different phases of the funnel. A hierarchy of effects, read top to bottom.
TOF = top of funnelMOF = middle of funnelBOF = bottom of funnel
For a young venture this is a question of stage discipline. Before there is anything to convert, the honest objective is awareness and understanding, and judging that campaign by revenue would kill something that was working. Once there is a product and a price, an awareness objective becomes an excuse and the objective has to move down the funnel into leads and conversions. The stage of the venture, not the ambition of the founder, decides which band deserves the money.
8 · From objective to message: features, benefits, four questions
Section titled “8 · From objective to message: features, benefits, four questions”Now the second half. The moment a recipient meets my communication, four questions run through their head in this order, and a message that fails any one of them stops there.
The distinction the slides use to answer them is the sharpest sentence in the section: a feature is something the product has, a benefit is something positive the product does for the customer. Almost every founder pitch I have seen, my own drafts included, answers only the first question and then stops, because the features are what we spent two years building. The recipient does not care what it has, they care what changes for them.
9 · Gains, pains, and how emotional a benefit may be
Section titled “9 · Gains, pains, and how emotional a benefit may be”The message has two complementary jobs, and a good campaign does both rather than choosing.
- What improves for them, described inside their own life or their own workflow: the forward-looking half of the message
- The risk, effort, cost or embarrassment they are silently expecting: the defensive half, and the one most pitches forget
The class example is an advertisement by a bank in Serbia for its mobile banking service, and it works precisely by putting the customers’ pains and gains of using mobile banking on the screen. The slide annotates two deliberate choices: it uses benefits rather than features, and emotional benefits rather than hard benefits. The promise is not a list of app functions, it is closer to your life will improve, at least a bit, and a bank service matching your way of life. Hard functional benefits would have been true and forgettable.
A medical mixed-reality venture in Hamburg shows the same dial turned in another direction. It has shifted the focus of its communication from the immediate benefit to an indirect benefit: rather than leading with what the technology does at the operating table, the communication now leads with overcoming staff shortages and attracting medical staff. That is a lesson about the buyer, not the product. For a hospital director the pain that keeps them awake is the roster, not the procedure, so the indirect benefit is the one that lands. Finding the benefit that matters most to the person holding the budget is a separate piece of work from finding the strongest technical benefit.
10 · The headline and the frame: why arguments alone are a mess
Section titled “10 · The headline and the frame: why arguments alone are a mess”The slides use a jigsaw puzzle for the last structural decision. A heap of puzzle pieces is a mess, and what makes the pieces usable is the picture printed on the box. In exactly the same way, a set of individually compelling arguments with no picture is a mess.
The session then condenses the message half into four learnings, and I would write these on the inside cover of my exam paper:
- Adapt the message to the recipient. Different target group, different message, out of the same product.
- Make the main message clear. One big picture, not five competing ones.
- Do not communicate features, communicate the value of the features. The feature is only the evidence for the benefit.
- Communication has to be easy and focused. Easy to take in, and willing to leave things out.
11 · One product, three audiences: the persona case
Section titled “11 · One product, three audiences: the persona case”The case used to practise all of this is a shopping platform that turns any image, video or text on the web into a single-click purchase. Content publishers, for example influencers, tag products natively inside their own content, and consumers buy without ever leaving the page. The positioning is a superior shopping experience that makes content better and easier to monetise. Because the platform only works if three groups join it, it needs three messages built from one product.
- An effective tool for monetising their content
- User friendly, intuitive and fast, requiring no technical knowledge
- Lets their audience shop without leaving the publisher pages
- Higher conversion than affiliate links and display ads deliver
- Data analytics on the product discovery journey happening outside their own shops and websites
- Automatically getting the best offer across all partners
- Frictionless, because they never leave the page they were enjoying, plus a fast one-click purchase with no need to check size and availability
- Technical sophistication of the publisher, from low to high
- Current engagement in monetisation, from low to high
- The four cells are four personas; the task is to pick one to target first, then set its key messages and its channels
The exercise is the point: once a priority persona is chosen, the two questions asked are which key messages that segment should get and why, and which channels and media should carry them and why. Message and channel are decided together, for one persona at a time.
Worked example
Section titled “Worked example”The venture: a small sensor box that clips onto older production machines and predicts bearing failures. The recipient group: maintenance managers in mid-sized metal-processing plants who have never heard of us. One group, one stage, one objective, one message.
| Element | What I write down |
|---|---|
| Recipient group | Maintenance managers, plants of 50 to 300 staff, northern Germany, no prior awareness of us |
| Stage in the journey | Problem recognition and learning about existing offers, so top of funnel |
| Company goal behind it | Build a qualified pipeline for the first paid pilots |
| Communication objective | Within one quarter, make 500 of these managers aware of us and convert 40 of them into marketing qualified leads by downloading the downtime checklist |
| What we expect them to do | Click the ad, read one page, leave a work email address for the checklist |
| Headline that frames it | Unplanned downtime is not bad luck, it is a bearing you could have heard failing |
| Gain shown | Fewer unplanned stoppages, maintenance planned into the shift instead of interrupting it |
| Pain removed | No rewiring, no machine downtime to install it, no new IT project to justify |
| Feature, used only as evidence | Magnetic clip-on box, battery powered, fitted in under ten minutes |
| KPIs and how measured | Impressions and brand recall for the awareness half, click-through rate and cost per acquisition for the lead half, read from the ad platform and the form fills over 12 weeks |
| What would count as failure | Plenty of traffic and almost no form fills, meaning the message reached people but never answered what is in it for them |
Commentary. The objective is testable in one sentence, which is the whole point: 500 aware and 40 qualified within a quarter either happens or it does not. The stage forced everything after it. Because these managers are at problem recognition, the headline is about their problem rather than about the sensor, and the technical feature appears only as proof that the promise is credible and low risk. Had I wrongly placed this group at the bottom of the funnel, I would have written a price-and-demo message and it would have bounced off people who have not yet accepted that they have a problem worth paying to solve. The pain half is doing quiet work too, because a maintenance manager’s real fear is not the invoice, it is having to stop a line and then explain a failed project to the plant manager. Finally, the failure mode is defined in advance, so the campaign produces a decision instead of an argument.
Apply it to your project
Section titled “Apply it to your project”-
List your target groups separately. One row each. If you cannot describe how their prior knowledge differs, they are probably one group; if you plan to say the same thing to all of them, you have not really segmented.
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Locate each group on a phase model. Use whichever fits: the adoption phases, AIDA, or the leads pipeline for business customers. Write down the single stage where the bulk of that group stands today, and note the emotion that goes with it, as the kitchen journey does.
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State one objective per group, in one sentence, with a number and a deadline. Name the effect you want and the action you expect. If it cannot be counted, rewrite it until it can.
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Choose the KPI and the measurement method in the same sentence. Which number moves, where you will read it, over what window, and what result would tell you it failed.
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Check the objective against your venture stage. Awareness objectives are legitimate before you have something to sell and an excuse afterwards. Do not spend bottom of funnel money on a product that cannot yet convert.
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Translate the product into benefits for that one group. Two columns, feature on the left and what it does for this recipient on the right. Only the right column is allowed into the message.
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Fill both halves: the gain to be seen and the pain to be removed. Then ask whether the strongest benefit is the immediate one or an indirect one that matters more to the person holding the budget.
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Write the headline last and test it. It has to show the big picture the way the lid of a puzzle box does, and it has to survive all four questions: what is that, what is in it for me, why should I care, so what. Then name an owner and a channel for the objective, and cut everything that does not serve the main message.
Key terms
Section titled “Key terms”| Term | What it means in plain words |
|---|---|
| Communication objective | What a specific recipient group should think, feel or do after being reached, stated so it can be measured |
| Recipient or target group | The named audience an objective and a message are written for, numbered 1 to n because there is rarely only one |
| Customer journey | The sequence of stages a buyer passes through, from not knowing you exist to repurchasing |
| Process of adoption | The oldest journey model: stimulus, knowledge, persuasion and decision, implementation, confirmation |
| AIDA | The most established phase model: attention, interest, desire, action, where action is the purchase |
| Purchasing process | The buyer’s view in business markets, from problem recognition through to selecting a supplier |
| Leads pipeline or customer funnel | The supplier’s view of the same journey: traffic, leads, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, opportunities, customers |
| After sales phases | Everything past the purchase: advocacy, repeat purchase and retargeting for consumers, referrals, expansion and reacquisition for businesses |
| Journey canvas | The grid with journey stages as columns and rows for activities, goals, emotions, touchpoints, company goals, KPIs and responsibilities |
| TOF, MOF, BOF | Top, middle and bottom of funnel: awareness, consideration, conversion, each with its own dominant objectives and KPIs |
| Feature and benefit | A feature is something the product has; a benefit is something positive the product does for the customer |
| Gains and pains | The two halves of a message: the improvement to be seen, and the fear to be removed |
| Framing and headline | The big picture that gives perspective, rationale and structure to a set of otherwise unordered arguments |
| Immediate versus indirect benefit | The direct effect of using the product versus a further consequence that may matter more to the buyer, such as staffing |
Test yourself
Section titled “Test yourself”- Name the four blocks of the communication planning frame and the questions attached to the objectives block.
- Give the two properties an objective must have to be usable, and say why each one matters.
- List the phases of the process of adoption and name the two groups of factors that influence how a buyer moves through them.
- In the kitchen journey, where does the emotional low point fall, and what does that imply for the plan?
- Explain the difference between a feature and a benefit, then give the four questions running through the recipient’s head.
- What did the medical mixed-reality venture change about its communication, and what general lesson does the slide draw from it?
Revision summary
Section titled “Revision summary”Next: Channels, Measures & KPIs → - where to say it, and how to know it worked.