Ideas you can use today

A huge part of your audience doesn’t even have a desk. They’re on the shop floor. In a hospital corridor. Driving between sites. Standing in a warehouse. Walking between meetings. Checking their phone between tasks. Your message isn’t being read in a quiet moment. It’s being scanned in the third space. The in-between moments of the workday.

While Creativity might win you the first reader, messaging designed for amplification determines whether your idea survives the third, fourth, and fifth reader.

Every team I’ve ever worked with swears they’re “aligned.” Everyone repeats the same tagline.  Everyone agrees on the messaging pillars. Everyone nods in the meeting. But most comms teams mistake word agreement for alignment. You’re united around language, not the meaning.

When Oracle laid off employees via a 6 a.m. email, the message did a few things right. It was clear. It was compliant. It told people what to do next. From a business perspective, it worked. But from a communication perspective, it failed in the one place that matters: the moment it was read.

Have you noticed how when you're about 10 minutes from a McDonald's, you start seeing their signs everywhere? That's the difference between messaging that pushes and messaging that guides.

One of the biggest myths in messaging is that you control what happens to your message. You don’t. Once your message leaves your desk, it enters a system you don’t own. And by the time it reaches the buyer, employee, or partner, it’s no longer your original message.

According to research from the Nielsen Norman Group: 79% of users scan any new page they come across; only 16% read word by word. That’s because attention exists on a spectrum. In the Third Space, people aren’t reading deeply. They’re filtering. If you want your message to survive in the Third Space, it has to work with how people think — not how we wish they did.

B2B companies love talking about differentiation…Right up until it’s time to actually write something. Then suddenly, everyone sounds exactly the same: Innovative. Trusted. World-class. A beige buffet of corporate buzzwords. Generic messaging doesn’t just sound boring — it actively works against you. It creates friction. It confuses buyers. It hides the real value you offer behind a fog of “blah blah blah.” So let’s look at three painfully common examples of generic messagi

Real people make decisions emotionally first, then justify rationally Nobody wakes up thinking, “Today, as a VP of Ops, I will…” They wake up thinking, “Crap, I’m already behind. What do I need to fix first?” Writing to job titles is the fastest way to get ignored. Titles don’t read your messaging. People do. When you write to a job title, you make three big mistakes:

Employees aren’t ignoring your internal comms because they don't care. They ignore them because nothing signals why it matters to them right now. There’s no urgency, no energy, no “I need to be part of this.”Just another polite FYI floating through Slack.

Most B2B messaging starts too late. We start with “Here’s what we do.” and talk about features, workflows, dashboards, ROI. We show the solution, the tool, the product in action. Our buyers story doesn’t start with your solution. It starts at “Here’s what went wrong.”

Dropping brilliance into your content isn’t enough when the surroundings are boring, distracting, and generic. Your job as a communicator isn’t just to have a gorilla—it’s to make sure people can’t miss it.