Before Deciding What You Want to Say, Decide What You Want People to See Differently.

I was reading an interview with Joe Jordan, who was preparing to take over as CEO of Domino’s. He’d been at Domino’s for 15 years and had done just about every job in the company.

As he prepared for the transition, he assembled his leadership team to talk about where they wanted to take the company. He asked:

What do we want our legacy to be in five years?
What do we want people in this organization to be saying about us?

He could have started with what they were going to change or where their challenges were, especially as the pizza business was seeing declining sales.

Operations, marketing, AI, etc.

Instead, he started with what he wanted to be true five years from now.

Many entrepreneurs and startups, when figuring out their branding, positioning and marketing, start with themselves and their products. What are we good at? What makes us different? What are our key messages? How do we explain what we do?

All of those are important. But there’s a question you need to ask first:

What do you want your customers to see differently?

Maybe there’s a problem they’ve learned to live with. Maybe the way they’ve always solved something has a limitation they haven’t really thought about. Maybe you do something meaningfully different, but customers don’t yet understand why that difference should matter to them.

If you can change the way they see the problem, figuring out what to say gets a lot easier.

Before deciding what you want to say, decide what you want people to see differently. Then work backward.

That’s how I approach messaging with my own clients: start with the customer and work backward to what the company should say.