Creating a positioning and messaging library
The brief
Company: KAYAK
Background: Joining KAYAK as the first Senior UX Writer meant that there was lots of work to be done to establish processes.
Problem: It was clear that good writing was already a priority - the brand team had solid guidelines for ToV and the like. But there was a gap between Product and the rest of the company. When it came to communicating our products and features, other teams in the company were lacking the technical information and positioning to do those products justice.
Solution: The Positioning and Messaging Library: a source of truth for all of KAYAK’s main features.
The work
Working collaboratively with the Comms Lead, Brand Writers, and relevant PMs and Product Leaders, I lead the development of the Positioning and Messaging Library for our core features.
The positioning section gives anyone from the company a correct, research backed understanding of the product. And the messaging library offers factually correct, utilitarian lines of copy in the KAYAK tone of voice that anyone could pull from.
For writers, it merely acts as a foundation to inform, to ensure we’re all starting from the same place; whilst the messaging should be different across the different channels, it should align across the user experience. But for others in the company just looking to get the right kind of description, they could pull lines directly.
For the positioning, I covered:
The core outline
The problem its solving
The key audience
Any relevant research we’ve completed
A clear breakdown of the product function, ranked in terms of user preference (pictured)
The future vision for the feature
Competitor analysis
And for the messaging, I created:
A boiler plate
An elevator pitch
Some key lines
A messaging matrix - based on the research from the previous section about user needs and priorities, leaning into a core selling point of the feature e.g. affordability or confidence (pictured)
The outcome
So far we’ve published the documents for Price Alerts, Explore, Trips, Filters and the app.
Working collaboratively on these documents has really branched the gap between brand writers and myself. The process has opened up much discussion about things like how we talk about features across teams and touchpoints, and where we lean into the brand voice. They’re also great resources from which to start - to ensure we all understand how the product works, how it’s being positioned both inside and outside of product, and how to talk about it to get the best results for the business and user alike.
And for those who aren’t professional writers, they can pull messaging directly from the messaging library and use it confidently in the knowledge it’s already been approved by a writer.