How to Extract Insight and Produce Brand Messaging That Actually Resonates

TL;DR

You can’t automate your way out of weak brand positioning. Before implementing AI and automation in your marketing, you need clear brand messaging grounded in real customer insight. This post introduces a practical framework for extracting that insight - through structured conversations with customers and prospects - and translating it into messaging that resonates emotionally and strategically. It requires actual human dialogue, not just AI synthesis. Get this right first, then automation becomes an accelerant rather than expensive noise.

Why Your Marketing Automation Isn’t Working

I’ve lost count of the times prospective clients have asked me to “SEO their website” - as if keyword stuffing and technical tweaks alone will transform their results. Perhaps understandable, with what various websites and spam emails (I assume you receive those too?) claim to be able to achieve.

It’s a fine line to tread. Yes, you might rank higher by optimising meta tags and loading in keywords. But what’s the point if traffic lands on your site, fails to feel sufficiently compelled to navigate further, and bounces without opening themselves up to a sales conversation?

The fact is, you’re in the marketing game, which means you need to start with the market. If you don’t deeply understand your target market, your product-market fit, and how to present your offering in a way that resonates, then it doesn’t matter how much technical polish you apply. It’s never going to work.

And you need to think further than just scanning and distilling the needs of your target audience. You need to understand what existing customers actually think of your products, services, and brand itself.

This can be challenging to do yourself - people are more likely to give honest feedback to a third party. Or if you’ve yet to launch anything, at least assemble a focus group from the relevant audience to test the water.

What AI Can’t Do (Yet)

This post is certainly a little off-topic from our usual tech-heavy fare, but it’s absolutely essential to have this level of insight before you attempt to ramp up any degree of automation and AI assistance with your go-to-market strategy.

Here’s what AI and automation solutions excel at:

• Synthesising data from multiple sources
• Identifying patterns in customer feedback
• Drafting variations of messaging once your positioning is clear
• Scaling content production across channels
• Testing and optimising campaigns in real-time

Here’s what AI cannot replace:

• Face-to-face conversations that uncover emotional drivers
• The subtle non-verbal cues that reveal what customers really value
• Building trust with customers to elicit honest feedback
• Understanding the cultural and competitive context your brand operates in
• Making strategic decisions about which insights matter most

You really do need people talking to people to extract genuine insight. It’s not possible to do everything with AI and automation technologies.

You can certainly take the answers from human conversations and use AI to synthesise insights, and even produce your messaging and campaign materials from this. But it has to start with real human dialogue.

The Brand Messaging Challenge No One Talks About

Most businesses I speak with have one of two problems:

Problem 1: They know their offering inside out - but they’ve never fully articulated why it matters to their customers, in language that resonates emotionally. They talk about features and capabilities, not the transformation their customers experience (or more specifically, why they should care about that transformation).

Problem 2: They’ve hired an agency to “do their messaging” - but the result is generic positioning that could apply to any competitor. There’s no distinctive insight, no emotional hook, no reason for prospects to care beyond a rational comparison.

Both problems stem from the same root cause: they haven’t extracted the depth of insight needed for succesful messaging.

Real insight comes from understanding:

• What your customers believed about your category before they met you
• What emotions your brand currently evokes (positive and negative)
• What transformation your customers experience because of you
• How their status or reputation changes after working with you
• What would genuinely be lost if your brand disappeared tomorrow

These aren’t questions you can answer by looking at your website analytics or running a survey. They require structured conversations - either workshops with internal stakeholders who regularly speak with customers, or ideally, direct conversations with customers and prospects themselves.

How to Extract Meaningful Insight: A Structured Framework

I’m not going to give you all the answers here, but I will share a practical framework I use when running brand messaging workshops. It’s both inward-looking (understanding your business purpose and beliefs) and outward-looking (understanding how customers perceive and experience your brand).

This framework covers ten core areas:

1. Business Context & Purpose

Before you can articulate your value to others, you need clarity on what business you’re truly in - beyond your products or services.

Key questions:

• What specific change or progress do you want to create in your market?
• Why does this matter now? What shift creates urgency?
• What future are you helping customers move towards?
• What would be lost if your brand disappeared tomorrow?

These questions force you beyond product descriptions into purpose and conviction. The answers often reveal the emotional core of your brand story.

2. Audience Understanding & Emotional Gap Analysis

This is where most messaging work should focus - understanding the gap between how your audience currently thinks and feels about you, versus how you want them to think and feel.

Current mindset (“As Is”):

• What do they currently believe about your brand?
• What emotions does your brand evoke right now?
• What assumptions or misconceptions do they hold?
• What keeps them from engaging more deeply?

Desired mindset (“To Be”):

• What should they believe about your brand’s role in their success?
• What emotions do you want associated with your brand?
• What should they say when recommending you?
• What single emotional shift defines the journey you want them to take?

For example: “From overwhelmed → to in control” or “From sceptical → to reassured”

The emotional journey mapping exercise tracks how you want prospects to feel at each stage - from awareness through to advocacy. This becomes your messaging blueprint for each touchpoint.

3. Competitive & Cultural Context

You’re not operating in a vacuum. Understanding what competitors make audiences feel - and identifying the emotional gaps in your category - helps you find distinctive positioning.

Key questions:

• Who are you most commonly compared with?
• How do competitors make their audiences feel?
• What are the dominant messages or clichés in your category?
• Where are the emotional or cultural gaps - what’s not being said that should be?

4. Value Chain: Functional → Emotional → Social

Most businesses can articulate functional value (“we deliver X outcome”). Fewer can articulate emotional value (“which makes you feel Y”). Almost none articulate social value (“which changes your status or reputation to Z”).

Example:

• Functional: “Faster, error-free data capture”
• Emotional: “Confident, in control, ahead of deadlines”
• Social: “Seen as an innovator in their field”

Mapping your value chain upward - from functional through emotional to social - reveals the transformation your customers experience. This transformation becomes the emotional hook for your messaging.

5. Meaningful Difference

What makes your brand substantively different, not just superficially? This isn’t about features - it’s about defensible competitive advantages.

Key questions:

• What makes us meaningfully different (substance, not superficiality)?
• What makes us practically indispensable (what would be lost without us)?
• What makes us adaptable and enduring (how will we stay relevant)?

If you can’t answer these convincingly, your messaging will sound like everyone else’s.

6. Proof & Credibility

Insight without evidence is just opinion. You need data, case studies, and customer stories that demonstrate the transformation you create.

Balance rational and emotional proof:

• Quantitative data builds trust (percentages, timeframes, metrics)
• Narrative proof humanises the brand (stories, moments of truth)

Both are essential. Numbers without stories feel clinical. Stories without numbers feel unsubstantiated.

7. Brand Personality & Tone

This defines how your brand speaks and behaves to evoke the right feelings.

Key questions:

• If your brand were a person, how would they speak and act?
• Which three adjectives describe your tone? (e.g. assured, curious, empathetic)
• How do you want audiences to feel after interacting with your brand?
• What should they say about you when you’re not in the room?

Tone is often the bridge between how your brand behaves and how it makes people feel. Get this wrong and even great messaging falls flat.

8. Core Narrative & Hook

What makes your story urgent right now? What insight sits at the heart of it?

Questions to surface this:

• What tension or truth makes your story urgent?
• What simple insight is the ‘aha’ moment?
• What’s the single most powerful transformation your customers experience?
• How can we express that as a memorable hook?

Examples: “The AI that actually listens” / “From chaos to confident control”

The hook captures why this matters now, not just what you do.

9. Positioning Statement

Once you’ve worked through the previous sections, you can synthesise everything into a clear positioning statement:

For [target audience]
who [have this need or frustration],
our brand is [category or frame of reference]
that [delivers key benefit / emotional outcome].
Unlike [competitor or alternative],
we [unique, meaningful difference].

This becomes your north star for all messaging decisions.

10. Messaging Framework Output

Finally, translate insight into structure:

• Core Idea: One-line brand essence (“Turning complexity into clarity”)
• Brand Pillars: 3-4 proof-backed value themes
• Key Messages: Supporting points for each pillar
• Emotional Outcome: The feeling you aim to evoke

From this framework, website copy, campaign messaging, and sales narratives flow naturally - because they’re all grounded in the same insight about what your customers need and how you uniquely deliver it.

Running an Effective Brand Messaging Workshop

If you want to extract this insight properly, you’ll need to run a structured discovery session - either as a workshop with internal stakeholders or through individual interviews with customers and prospects.

Typical format:

• Duration: 2-3 hours for sections 1-5 (business context through meaningful difference)
• Participants: Founders, sales leaders, marketing leads, and ideally 2-3 customers
• Outcome: Raw insight captured, not polished messaging yet

Then spend time synthesising:

• Sections 6-10 are synthesis work - translating raw insight into messaging structure
• Test emerging messaging with at least 2 real customers before finalising
• Highlight recurring emotional words - these often form your tagline or campaign language

Critical success factor: You need honest feedback. People will give you more candid responses if:

• A third party is facilitating (not the founder or CEO)
• You create psychological safety (no judgement, all input is valuable)
• You ask specific questions rather than “what do you think of us?”

Why This Matters Before You Automate

Once you have clear brand messaging grounded in real insight, automation and AI become genuine accelerants. You can:

• Generate content variations at scale - all anchored to the same core positioning
• Test messaging across channels - knowing which emotional outcomes to track
• Personalise campaigns - without losing brand consistency
• Optimise in real-time - with confidence that you’re amplifying the right message

But without this foundation, you’re just automating mediocrity at the best, dissonance at the worst. You’ll produce content faster, but it won’t resonate. You’ll scale campaigns, but they won’t convert. You’ll optimise endlessly, but you’ll never break through.

The hard truth: Getting brand messaging right is time-consuming, requires difficult conversations, and can’t be shortcut by AI. But it’s the difference between marketing that generates noise and marketing that builds lasting momentum.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can’t I just use AI to analyse customer feedback and generate messaging?

AI can help synthesise patterns from existing feedback, but it can’t extract the nuanced emotional drivers that come from face-to-face conversations. Use AI for synthesis, not discovery.

Q: How long does a brand messaging workshop typically take?

Plan for 2-3 hours of structured discovery, then 1-2 weeks for synthesis and drafting. Testing with customers adds another week. Total elapsed time: 3-4 weeks if done properly.

Q: What if we don’t have existing customers to interview?

Assemble a focus group from your target audience. Offer them something valuable in exchange for their time - early access, discount, or simply the opportunity to shape a product they’ll use.

Q: How often should we revisit our brand messaging?

Annually at minimum. More frequently if you’re entering new markets, launching new products, or if competitive dynamics shift significantly. Your positioning should evolve with your business.

Q: Do we really need a third party to facilitate this?

Not strictly necessary, but highly recommended. Internal stakeholders often struggle to be objective, and customers give more honest feedback to someone who isn’t directly tied to the business.

Q: Do workshops need to be in-person?

Nothing quite compares to candid in-person conversations, but video calls are a close second. If absolutely necessary, phone conversations are better than email, but do lose some of the nuance and honesty of a face-to-face discussion. It’s better to scale to more customers, even if this can’t be done in-person, but the more human the connection, the better.

Get in Touch

If you’d like assistance running a brand messaging workshop - either for your internal team or including customer interviews - get in touch. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how big a difference this makes to the performance of your campaigns over time.

Once you have clear positioning, we can help you implement the automation and AI capabilities that amplify it. But we always start with the foundations.

Book a discovery call to discuss your brand messaging challenges.

About the Author

Marc Price is the founder of Aandai, a B2B automation and AI consultancy specialising in go-to-market processes for mid-market businesses. With over 20 years of experience in SEO, demand generation, and RevOps, Marc has helped dozens of businesses refine their positioning and build marketing systems that drive measurable results. He takes an evidence-based approach to marketing and believes that technology should amplify good strategy, not replace it.