B2B messaging study
B2B Messaging
Finding ideas and words that compel. We take the language from your buyers' own mouths and test the candidate messages with them before anything reaches a headline.
Chapter 01
Messages written in the seller's language instead of the buyer's
Most B2B messaging is drafted inside the company. The product team supplies the feature names, sales supplies its favorite proof points, and a founder supplies the phrase everyone has been saying for years. It all sounds accurate to the people in the building and like background noise to the buyer, who describes the same problem in different words and never connects the two.
Power Decisions treats messaging as a research problem before it is a writing problem. The service is described as finding ideas and words that compel, and the order matters: ideas first, then the words to carry them. Thomas Brown starts with an engagement plan tailored to your goals and assumptions, and you approve it before work begins. What you currently believe buyers care about goes into that plan so it can be checked, not defended.
The method also looks past what buyers say they value. Conversational research blends storytelling with semi-structured dialogue to reveal emotional drivers and purchase rationales, which is where unspoken needs live and where a message either lands or doesn't.
Blank index cards spread on an oak table, one squared up apart from the rest
Capturing buyer language verbatim in interviews
Kinetic Depth Interviews are one-to-one, peer-level conversations led by an interview plan instead of a questionnaire. That freedom is what makes them useful for messaging. A buyer asked to describe the problem your product solves will pick words, order the problem in their own way and leave out the parts your brochure leads with. Those choices are the raw material, and they are recorded as spoken, not tidied into your vocabulary.
Online forums do the same job for audiences that are hard to schedule. Power Decisions' own guidance on moderating B2B online focus groups makes the point that a group can reveal not only what decision-makers value but how they articulate it, and that the raw language collected there fuels message testing. B2B participants often arrive guarded and overly professional, so the moderator's first job is to disarm that early and then keep the conversation exploratory with probing, non-leading questions.
The discussion guide runs on two levels: strategic objectives, and tactical flexibility to follow a golden thread when one appears. A phrase a CIO repeats three times without being prompted is exactly the kind of thread worth following, and it is often the headline.
Chapter 03
Turning themes into words that compel, then checking them with buyers
After the conversations come themes. The executive brief translates themes, quotes and customer narratives into strategic implications and clear recommendations for messaging, and it keeps the buyers' own phrases next to the ideas they carry. You see which words came from the market and which came from a guess, and you can tell them apart.
Then the candidate messages go back to buyers. Concept development at Power Decisions covers advertising concepts, ad theme concepts and appeals, and brand names, and it holds to a few principles: concept statements address both tangible attributes and emotional appeals, early work is about developing concepts rather than screening them, and testing outcomes are expected to spark new ideas, so room for that is built into the process. Later rounds can move online, where a variety of exhibits lets buyers react to the message in a form close to how they will actually meet it.
Power Decisions has done this kind of word-finding before. For an H-P technology spin-off with a new lighting product, the work was developing a compelling brand name and advertising positioning as the focal point of a consumer strategy. If your message isn't getting the response it should, call Thomas Brown in Forest Knolls at 415-328-7927 to talk it through.
Power Decisions, Forest Knolls, California. Call 415-328-7927 or write Tom@powerdecisions.com.