Messaging for security and resilience companies
Positioning decides what you are. Messaging decides whether four different people, reading the same sentence, all reach the conclusion you intended. In security, one of those people is paid to find the flaw in it.
What is the difference between positioning and messaging?
Positioning is the decision about which buyer you are for and what you are the obvious choice for. Messaging is the language that carries that decision to each audience without changing its meaning. Positioning is chosen once and rarely; messaging is written many times and tested constantly.
Most companies asking for a messaging project actually have an unresolved positioning decision. When that is true, no amount of writing helps, because the language is being asked to hide a choice nobody made. When positioning is settled, messaging becomes a craft problem with a clear test: does the meaning survive being retold by someone who does not work here.
Why does security messaging fail?
Security buyers evaluate assertions the way they evaluate a vendor questionnaire. An unsupported claim does not read as ambition; it reads as a reason to doubt the next claim too. So the unit of security messaging is the pair: what you assert, and what proves it. A number, a named customer, a certification, a benchmark, a demo.
This is why messaging work so often surfaces product gaps. If a claim has no available proof, that is not a writing problem to solve with better adjectives — it is a finding, and it is cheaper now than in a proof of concept.
How do you write for four readers at once?
The practitioner, the security or risk leader, the economic buyer, and third-party risk all read the same page and need different things. The common failure is to average them: soften the claim until it offends none of them, which makes it register with none of them either.
The working approach is one claim, varied evidence. Hold the assertion constant and change what supports it per reader. That keeps the message consistent across the website, the deck, and the security review, which is the only way it survives many audiences at once.
What should you delete?
Enterprise-grade. Next-generation. AI-powered. Robust. Seamless. Each of these appears on every competitor in the category and therefore carries no information. Worse, each one is standing where a specific sentence should be — the actual reason you reached for the word. Delete the adjective and write the reason.
We named microsimulations for iluminr and wrote the language around it. Analysts adopted the term, and iluminr has been named in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Risk, Compliance and Audit Technologies three years running.
How do you know the messaging works?
A message is not finished when it reads well internally. It is finished when a champion can carry it to a colleague who has never spoken to you and the meaning arrives intact. That test is cheap to run and almost never run, which is why so many companies scale a message that only works with a narrator attached.
- Read it to someone outside the category and ask what the company does.
- Ask a customer to describe you, then compare their words to yours.
- Take it into a live security review and watch which sentence gets challenged.
- Send the deck with no narration and ask what problem it solves.
What people ask
Why does security messaging fail?
Usually because a claim has no evidence attached. Security buyers are trained to test assertions, so an unsupported claim does not read as ambitious, it reads as a reason to distrust the rest. The second cause is writing for a practitioner and an economic buyer in the same sentence.
How do you write for multiple audiences without diluting the message?
Keep one claim and vary the evidence behind it. The practitioner gets specifics, the leader gets the program consequence, the economic buyer gets the comparison to doing nothing. Diluting means softening the claim so it offends nobody, which makes it invisible.
How do you know if messaging is working?
It survives retelling. A champion repeats it internally to someone who has never met you, and the meaning arrives intact. If the message only works when a seller narrates it, it is not a message, it is a script.
What should be deleted from most security messaging?
Words that appear on every competitor: enterprise-grade, next-generation, AI-powered, robust, seamless. They carry no information in this market. Each one hides the specific thing that made you want to write it, which is the sentence you should have written.
Messaging sits in the Strategy phase of OPSI, downstream of the audience decision and upstream of everything that gets built. Related: positioning, product marketing, and sales enablement.