What a Messaging Hierarchy Looks Like, and How to Build the Matrix

A messaging hierarchy is a pyramid. One value message sits at the top, three or four pillars sit beneath it, each pillar carries its own proof, and audience and channel wordings sit at the bottom. Written out it is usually one page: a sentence, a row of headings, and the evidence stacked under each heading.

This is for marketers building the thing rather than deciding whether they need one. Where positioning ends and messaging begins is a separate argument, handled in brand positioning vs messaging framework. What follows is the structure, the pillar anatomy, and the matrix.

What does a messaging hierarchy look like?

It looks like four stacked layers, each one narrower in scope and larger in volume than the one above it.

• The value message. One sentence, brand level, said to everybody. It is not your positioning statement, which is an internal decision written for the team. This is the outward version, and it should survive being read aloud.
• The pillars. Three or four themes that the value message rests on. Each is a claim you are willing to be judged on.
• The support. Under each pillar, the reasons to believe it and the evidence for those reasons. Features, capabilities, references, anything a sceptic could check.
• The expressions. The audience and channel wordings that get written from the layers above. These are the sentences that end up in a subject line or on a pricing page.

There is no canonical number of layers. Some frameworks split support into reasons to believe and proof points, some bolt a tagline layer on top, some skip the value message and start at pillars. Four is the common working shape because it maps to how the artifact gets used: one thing everybody says, a few things the copy keeps returning to, evidence when challenged, and the wording that changes per audience.

A skeleton for a rota and scheduling product, cut short:

• Value message: Publish a rota in minutes that holds up to the rules.
• Pillars: Live in a week · Compliant before you publish · Swaps without the phone tree
• Support under pillar two: rules configured per site; breach warnings shown while editing, not after publishing; an audit trail on every published version.

Read top to bottom, that is what a hierarchy looks like. Read bottom to top, it is a test: any sentence in your copy should be traceable to a pillar, and any pillar should be traceable to the value message. Copy that cannot be traced anywhere is not necessarily wrong, but nobody agreed to it.

What is a messaging pillar example?

A pillar is a theme with evidence attached, not a slogan. Here is one written out at the level of detail that makes it usable:

Pillar: Compliant before you publish

• Claim: The rota is checked against working-time rules and individual contract terms before anyone can see it.
• Reasons to believe: rules are configured per site rather than globally; breaches are flagged at the point of editing; every published version keeps an audit trail.
• Proof you can show: the warning state in a live demo, the configuration screen, the version history on a published rota.
• What this pillar does not claim: that compliance is guaranteed. Anything that reads as a legal assurance goes past someone qualified to sign it off before it goes anywhere near a headline.

That last line is the part teams skip, and it is the part that stops a pillar being quietly inflated by whoever writes the next campaign. A pillar with a stated boundary is much harder to overreach.

Three to four pillars is the working range most teams settle on. There is no rule behind that number, but there is a practical reason for it: past about five, copywriters stop consulting the list and start picking their two favourites, and the pillars nobody picks die without anyone noticing. If you have eight candidate themes, some of them are proof points that have been promoted above their station. Demote them.

How do you create a messaging matrix?

Put the pillars across the top, the audiences down the side, and write one sentence in each cell that somebody in that audience would recognise as being about their week. That grid is the messaging matrix, and it is the thing briefs and campaigns are actually written from. The wider document it lives inside is covered in brand messaging framework.

The build, in order:

1. Fix the pillars first. A matrix built on unagreed pillars just spreads the disagreement across more cells.
2. Choose audiences by decision role, not demographics. The person who uses the product, the person who signs for it, and the person whose day changes are three different audiences even inside one company.
3. Write each cell in the audience’s own vocabulary. Not a translation of the pillar. The finance director does not want a friendlier version of the operations message, they want the version about money.
4. Attach evidence, or mark the cell unproven. A cell you cannot support yet is useful information. A cell you cannot support and have not flagged is a future correction.
5. Leave cells empty when the pillar does not apply. Empty is a legitimate answer and a much better one than filler.
6. Date it and version it. Undated messaging documents get quoted years after they stopped being true.

Here is the matrix for the same product, at the size a real one should be:

Audience	Live in a week	Compliant before you publish	Swaps without the phone tree
Operations manager	Your first live rota in week one, built from the spreadsheet you already keep	Rest-break and contract breaches flag while you edit, not after payroll runs	Swaps go through the app with your approval, so nobody rings you on a Sunday
Finance director	No implementation project and no consultancy line in the budget	Fewer retrospective pay corrections, because the breach was caught at rota stage	Overtime is approved before it is worked rather than discovered in the payroll run
Shift worker	(no message: rollout speed is not their problem)	You can see your hours and rest gaps before the week starts	Post a shift, take a shift, no group chat at eleven at night

Note the empty cell. That is the most instructive thing on the grid, because completeness is how most matrices fail. A team sits down, produces a tidy nine-cell rectangle, and roughly three of those sentences were written to close a gap rather than because anybody had something to say. Nobody can tell which three afterwards, so the copywriter treats all nine with equal suspicion and writes from the brief instead. The cells worth keeping are the ones somebody argued about.

Getting three teams to agree the pillars is the genuinely hard part, and it usually happens in a meeting that produces no record. Run it as a structured session instead, which is what Projan does: it asks each participant which claim they would defend on a customer call and what evidence they would produce for it, so what comes out is a written pillar set rather than one marketer’s recollection. Whatever you use, the rule holds: a pillar nobody objected to was probably not read.

What are the five parts of a message?

There is no canonical five in marketing. The phrase comes from communication studies, where the elements usually taught are the sender, the message, the channel, the receiver and the feedback, and that model describes how a conversation travels rather than how a line of copy is built. It will not help you fill in a matrix cell.

For a brand message, five parts are worth checking before a sentence goes out:

1. The claim. What you are asserting. If a reader cannot disagree with it, it is not a claim.
2. The relevance. Why this reader, and why now. This is the part that changes per matrix row.
3. The reason to believe. The mechanism that makes the claim plausible.
4. The proof. The specific evidence you would produce if challenged.
5. The ask. What the reader is meant to do next, including nothing, if the message is a brand message.

Treat that as a checklist rather than a standard. Nobody is marking your work, and plenty of good messages carry four of the five. The one that is almost never optional is the claim: strip it out and you are left with description, which reads as accurate and persuades nobody.

What are the four types of messages?

The four types that search results offer are usually verbal, non-verbal, written and visual, which is a communication-studies taxonomy and has nothing to do with a messaging hierarchy. Inside a hierarchy the useful split is by how often each type changes and who is allowed to change it.

1. The value message. One of them. Changes when the company changes. Signed off at the top.
2. Pillar messages. Three or four. Change roughly annually. Owned by whoever owns positioning, and edits go through them.
3. Proof messages. Many. Change whenever the product or the evidence changes, which is often. Anyone can add, but each needs a source.
4. Audience messages. One per useful matrix cell. Rewritten freely, tested, discarded when they stop working.

That volatility gradient is the practical point. Most messaging documents rot because all four types are stored in one file with no indication of which lines are settled and which are this quarter’s experiment, so a copywriter treats a two-year-old value message and a half-tested subject line as equally authoritative. Mark them differently, even if only with a date column.

What is an example of message framing?

Framing is stating the same true claim in a way that changes what the reader compares it to. It is a change of reference point, not a change of fact. One claim from the matrix above, framed four ways:

Frame	The same claim	When it works
Gain	Publish a rota you know is legal	Confident buyers, brand-level copy
Loss	Stop finding breaches in the payroll run	Buyers who have been burned recently
Effort	One check before you publish instead of a manual audit after	Buyers comparing against a manual process
Reference point	The rules check happens at rota stage, not at pay stage	Buyers who do not yet know the problem has a stage

All four are the same capability. Which one lands depends on what the reader currently believes the alternative is, which is why framing decisions belong in the matrix cells rather than in a style guide. Loss framing is overused in business software and stops working quickly on an audience that has seen it three times this month.

Framing is not permission to bend the claim. If the gain version implies a guarantee the loss version carefully avoids, you have not reframed anything, you have written a claim you cannot support and hidden it in the more optimistic sentence. The claim is fixed before the framing starts, which is another argument for writing the pillar’s boundary down. Once a matrix exists, it feeds directly into the campaign and creative briefs that agencies and in-house designers work from.

Frequently asked questions

What is the structure of a message? In finished copy the usual order is claim first, relevance second, proof third, ask last. The headline carries the claim, the subhead makes it relevant to this reader, the body supplies proof, and the button asks for something. The parts do not have to appear in that order, but a message with no claim in it reads as description rather than persuasion.

Who owns the messaging matrix? Usually product marketing, or whoever wrote the positioning. Ownership means keeping the pillars stable and arbitrating changes, not writing every cell alone. Sales and support should be able to propose edits, because they hear the objections that make a cell wrong. If nobody is named as owner, the matrix quietly forks into three versions inside a quarter.

How often should a messaging matrix be updated? Update it when something real changes: a new segment, a competitor claim you now have to answer, or a product change that alters a proof point. A calendar review once or twice a year catches drift. Rewriting it every quarter for its own sake usually means the pillars were never agreed properly and the team is relitigating positioning.

Do you need a separate messaging matrix for each channel? No. Keep one matrix of audiences against pillars, and let channel adaptation happen in the brief or in the copy itself. Adding channel as a third dimension turns a readable page into a spreadsheet nobody opens. If a channel needs genuinely different messages rather than different lengths, the audience split is probably wrong.

A hierarchy is only worth building if the copy underneath it can be traced back up. Keep the pillars few enough that people remember them, keep the matrix honest enough that empty cells are allowed, and settle the positioning statement above it before you start writing rows.