Most companies struggle to communicate their value in a way that resonates. They either sound like everyone else or get lost in their own complexity. The result? Confused customers, disjointed teams, and stalled growth.
Jed Morley’s Building a Brand That Scales offers a clear solution: a marketing messaging framework built on deep customer insight and brand alignment. This is a practical system that has helped brands from the early stage to hypergrowth articulate their value and scale with clarity.
If you’ve been looking for a real-world messaging framework, a usable marketing messaging framework template, or just want to understand what a messaging framework is, you’re in the right place.
What Is a Messaging Framework?
A messaging framework is a structured system for articulating your brand’s value in a clear, consistent, and customer-relevant way. It defines what to say, who to say it to, and how to say it—across every touch point.
You can influence what customers think of your brand, but you can’t decide what it means to them. Your job is to create the words, images, and experiences that shape that meaning intentionally.
Unlike one-off taglines or mission statements, a true brand messaging framework aligns your entire organization, internally and externally. It takes your brand purpose, position promise, pillars, and personality, and translates them into scalable, actionable messaging for every audience and offering.
Why Your Brand Needs a Messaging Framework to Scale
Brands that scale teach their teams how to communicate their value in a compelling, consistent way. Without a messaging framework, companies experience:
- Misaligned internal messaging
- Inconsistent customer experiences
- Missed opportunities in marketing and sales
With a framework, brands gain:
- A repeatable process to express value across all platforms
- A shared vocabulary across departments
- Messaging clarity that builds trust and drives preference
The Foundation: The Backstory Brand Wheel™ Framework
Backstory’s messaging framework is one element of the larger Backstory Brand Wheel™ Framework, a four-phase system for building scalable brands:
- Brand Discovery – Conduct in-depth interviews, brand audits, and competitive analysis to uncover insights.
- Brand Foundation – Define your brand purpose, position, promise, pillars, and personality.
- Brand Expression – Translate your foundation into messaging, narrative, and visual identity.
- Brand Activation – Apply your messaging consistently across all customer touchpoints.
Your marketing messaging framework lives in Phase 3: Brand Expression, but it’s built on the foundational clarity of Phases 1 and 2.
Types of Marketing Messaging Frameworks
There are several types of marketing messaging frameworks—positioning statements, value prop pyramids, brand scripts—but most fall short because they either:
- Ignore emotional drivers
- Don’t scale across products or audiences
- Lack internal alignment
The Backstory Brand Messaging Framework is different. It’s built from customer insights, not internal guesswork. It also scales across:
- Products (with offering-level messaging)
- Audiences (with persona-based messaging)
- Touchpoints (with consistent brand messaging at every level)
This layered approach works for complex, multi-audience brands like Lucid, Gabb, and Crucial Learning.
How to Build Your Messaging Framework: Step by Step
Here’s a simplified marketing messaging framework template based on Backstory’s method:
1. Start with Discovery
- Interview internal stakeholders and external customers.
- Use the Brand Ladder Method: ask about features, benefits, feelings, and values.
“Great brands communicate and connect with customers on all four levels.”
2. Define Your Foundation
- Brand Purpose – Why you exist beyond making money
- Brand Position – What you want to be known for
- Brand Promise – The overarching value you deliver
- Brand Pillars – Your key differentiators
3. Craft Message Blocks for Each Audience and Offering
Each block includes:
- A Benefit Statement (imperative mood, <10 words)
- A Blurb (2-3 sentences explaining how/why we accomplish this benefit)
4. Build a Message Stack
Combine five message blocks for each offering or audience. This becomes your go-to source of messaging for:
- Landing pages
- Sales decks
- Email campaigns
- Internal training
Tools and Tables That Guide the Work
Building a Brand That Scales provides two efficient tools to support the research required to develop your framework:
Table 1: Brand Ladder Method
Table 2: Qualitative Methods for Brand Discovery
These tools reveal why customers buy, not just what they buy—and that insight fuels better messaging.
Conclusion: Messaging As the Strategic Core of Scalable Brands
If brand strategy is the engine, messaging is the fuel. Without a clear, tested, emotionally resonant marketing messaging framework, your brand will struggle to scale.
Your next step? Build your own brand messaging framework based on Backstory’s proven methods. Start with interviews. Follow the Brand Ladder. Translate insights into structured, repeatable messaging stacks. Combine these into a framework that will guide your messaging efforts across all customer touchpoints.
The brands that scale are the ones that know how to say what they mean—clearly, consistently, and convincingly, no matter the offering, no matter the audience.
Want to Know Where Your Messaging Stands?
Take the Backstory Brand Wheel™ Assessment to identify gaps in your current messaging and get actionable steps to strengthen it.
Frequently Asked Questions
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