The message house is a timeless visualisation tool that is used in branding, marketing, public relations and more. Whether you’re planning to market a new product or service, share your brand’s value propositions with a media publication, or get a new hire familiarised with the values of your company, the message house is an efficient framework to get you started.

So, what is it exactly?

Simply put, the message house is a structured creation process that helps us to think through the key components of a business. It guides us in the process of building and establishing our brand.

There are three components in a message house:

1. The main message states in a single sentence what your business is about. This includes its main objective, mission and vision. 
2. Core messages are supporting statements that reinforce the main message. This is your opportunity to expand on your main message, highlighting important unique selling points and values about the business.
3. The proof points form the foundation. They are the factual pieces of evidence that support the claims you make in your main and core messages. 

There are also three rules to bear in mind when designing the components:

1. They must be clear and easy to understand.
2. Make sure only true things are reflected about the business.
3. The components should be timeless and future-ready.

Why is it important for businesses to have a message house?

We educate our clients on how time invested into a message house will lead to returns on investment later on. Business owners who disregard message houses often assume that it is ‘just a thought exercise’ or a ‘nice-to-have-but-unnecessary’ thing. 

The reality is, having a well-designed message house provides focus, improves communication, and saves everyone a lot of time. Here are some examples of what we mean.

Marketing & Communications

How often have you been stuck in long meetings, debating new slogans or social media campaign ideas? Every opinion is different and valid, but no one can agree on anything. By the end of the meeting, no decision is made and everyone feels like they wasted their time. The same thing happens if you are trying to engage an external party, say a designer or copywriter, and you find yourself unable to communicate what you want clearly.

Sound familiar?

With a message house, you have an ‘anchor’ to refer to, so you can realign the conversation if a meeting goes off tangent. When designing campaigns, you ensure that your messages are always coherent and consistent, which adds positively to your brand’s image.

This also translates to how you craft your story pitches to publications and how you build your relationships with journalists. It also lends itself to how you design internal communications strategies when communicating with your team.

Human Resources

Growing your team is not easy. You conduct interviews and hope to find the right person for the job, and that alone can be a challenging process. Once you have found the right person, the onus is on you to guide them through a thorough onboarding process. 

Question – Do you have a robust interview process? And after you hire someone, is there an onboarding process, or at the very least, some form of orientation process?

If you have not given any thought to this, you should. As a business owner, I am sure you have had the experience of hiring someone, and eventually realising the person was not the right fit. This could be due to unsaid expectations from both parties, an inadequate interview process, or realisations that the company or the new hire is not a good fit culturally once work has started.

A message house helps you to communicate succinctly and clearly the important values and goals of your business. It allows you to use it as a conversational tool to find out your new employee’s views during the interview process. Post-hiring, it can function as a training and orientation tool to help your new hire gain a deeper understanding of what the business is all about.

Having a team where everyone is clear on the business goals and values is something every business owner wants. When every team member is well-versed in this information, they automatically become aligned employees and advocates for the business.

There are many more applications of a message house, but the above are the most common ones we have come across in our experience.