Your message’s mission — Kelford Labs Daily

“The normal purpose of conversation is to arrive at an agreed contextual understanding, or to celebrate its prior existence.”

— A. F. Parker-Rhodes, Inferential Semantics

The problem with knowing what to say in marketing messages comes down to knowing what we mean to say, right?

Like, the typing or talking isn’t the problem. You’ve got that part figured out.

The problem is what you’re supposed to be typing, or saying.

The problem is knowing what we’re trying to communicate. What Parker-Rhodes would call the “rhema” (units of structured thought) of our uttered statements.

But what if I told you your messages already have a mission? There’s already something quite specific you’re supposed to be communicating.

And Parker-Rhodes told us in the opening quote:

Every message, marketing or otherwise, we put out into the world has a mission:

• Come to agreement or celebrate its existence

How does that apply to our marketing? Quite simply, I think. Remember, our job as marketers is never to convince, it is to find the people who already want the specific value we provide.

So that means the mission of our marketing messages is as simple as:

• Demonstrate that our prospects already agree with our perspective

How do we do that? By showing them that it works.

I’m doing that in this very newsletter:

You started out skeptical that there was a simple mission for every message. But then I showed you that all utterances and messages have a clear mission that maps to marketing, too.

Once we agreed upon the mission of all messages I transferred that agreement to the mission of marketing messages.

And once you saw that this simple principle makes marketing messages easier, you’re able to see that you already agree with this perspective.

You just hadn’t really thought about it this way before.

That’s all you have to do with your content and marketing messages, too:

Demonstrate that your prospects agree with your process by showing them that it works in the real world.

So go ahead and try it, and you’ll see that it works for you, too.

Mission accomplished.

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

Kelford Inc. shows communicators the way to always knowing what to say.