Jenny Scribani
Aligning 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
JennyScribani.com
LinkedIn
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG1S8dUBCzM
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.
