Imagine holding a map that guides every word your company communicates. That’s your messaging playbook. It's a strategic document that outlines how your brand communicates with its audience. This playbook guides not just the content of your communications, but also a reflection of your brand's voice, tone, and the way you want your audience to perceive you.

When we get calls from companies to help them fix their messaging, we ask them to send us their brand docs and guidelines. Here’s what we typically get:

• Some companies (even huge ones) will send us their brand book which includes mission, vision, values, and a brand style guide which might even include guidance on voice, etc.
• Others will just send us a version of their mission, vision, values and perhaps their messaging pillars.

“Do you have any sort of guidelines that govern how you scale your messaging?” No.

There are a variety of reasons companies call us to fix or improve their messaging, but most of them boil down to this:

1. Large or dominant companies: their messaging has reached a tipping point of inconsistency that they are no longer able to tolerate, but they don’t have a solution as to how to control it.
2. Smaller or challenger companies: they are struggling to adequately articulate how they’re different in the market in a way that will give them an edge that fuels growth. In other words, what they’re saying is not compelling enough to win the business they need.

In other words, they’ve reached a point where the guidance they have is not enough. And that’s because things have changed at a blistering pace. As I write this, the reality is this: Every company is a communications company. To stay alive as a business, companies increasingly need to communicate at scale, internally and externally. And it’s simply too hard to communicate at scale without a playbook.

This book will cover in detail how to develop and deploy your playbook. But the playbook is not the end. A basketball team can have the best coach in the world, and a playbook of the most elegant plays ever developed,  but if the players aren’t great, the team doesn’t practice the plays together, spend time in the gym, and all the other things, they’re not going to win a lot of games.

So here’s the new model of what what every company needs:

1. Mission Vision & Values
2. Brand Guidelines
3. Actionable Messaging Playbook

The Actionable Messaging Playbook™ is the tool that activates your Mission, Vision & Values in keeping with your Brand Guidelines. The three assets work together. For many of you, developing your messaging playbook will stress-test what you already have, and for some of you, your current guidelines will fail. For that reason, I’ll briefly cover the Mission, Vision, Values doc as well as the relevant portions of the Brand Guidelines.

But first, let’s take a look at the Actionable Messaging Book framework. This is the foundation of your playbook, and I’ll be guiding you through how to complete this in the first section of the book, including the things you need to know before you start this work.

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