A client sent me a messaging framework last week with eleven pillars in it. Eleven. Each one had a headline, three proof points, and a small icon. It had clearly survived four rounds of internal review, and you could read the fingerprints: somebody in sales added reliability, somebody in product added modularity, somebody senior added a pillar about people. Nothing had been removed, because removing something means telling a colleague their thing is not the thing.
I asked the group one question. If a customer remembered exactly one sentence out of all of this, which sentence would you want it to be?
Six seconds of silence. Then three different answers. Not variations on an answer. Three different ones, from the three people who most needed to agree.
Message hierarchy is not formatting, it is the decision about what you are willing to be known for, and a list of eleven equal things is a refusal to make it.
Here's the part that gets lost. Audiences never read your framework. They carry one impression of you, and they built it out of a single claim, usually one they heard secondhand from a friend. Liquid Death is canned water that looks like beer. Patagonia will repair your jacket instead of selling you a new one. Salt & Straw makes flavors that sound like a dare. Each of those companies says many other true things about itself. None of the other things do any work.
The second claim is not a smaller version of the first. It is a competitor to the first. Every additional sentence you set at the same level of emphasis borrows attention from the one that would have landed, and attention does not compound, it divides. Three roughly equal claims give you a third of one brand, not three brands.
So the real deliverable of a messaging exercise is not a document. It is a hierarchy that somebody with authority has signed. One claim on top. Everything else demoted to support, in writing, where it can be pointed at during the next argument. The demotion is the value. If the hierarchy lives only in the strategist's head it dies the first time a VP asks why their pillar went missing. I have never once been thanked for this in the meeting, only about nine months later.
The second claim is not a smaller version of the first. It is a competitor to the first.
Saturday I was at the sticky floored place off Belmont, waiting out somebody's very committed Bonnie Tyler. The host, who calls everyone baby, has one rule he repeats all night to anyone flipping through the book. Pick the song people already know. He is right, and he has never seen a messaging framework in his life.