Brand Message Architecture — The DNA of Your Website Content Strategy

How you communicate about your organization on your website — and elsewhere — is a foundational pillar of your brand strategy. Here's how you can align your organization across a unified brand message architecture.

There are many critical structural underpinnings to your website — your sitemap, your CMS build, your publishing workflow, and your design system, just to name a few. These systems and structures define hierarchy, encourage consistency, and establish the parameters within which your website functions.

A key addition to this list is what we call a brand message architecture. This comprises the messaging priorities for your website, arranged into a hierarchy that helps you understand more than just what to communicate via your website, but also the value of each message in support of your primary website goals and audiences.

What is a Brand Message Architecture?

Brand message architecture is a hierarchy of the key communication goals of your website, setting the prioritized foundation of how you tell your brand story through the web. Your brand message architecture primarily informs the development of content assets, but can also influence your information architecture and design processes as well. 

But why a hierarchy? Aren’t all messages important?

Creating a hierarchy of brand messages helps focus you communicate with your website’s primary audience (and you may find natural applications for this across other platforms or media, too). Key messages and their supporting themes focus your brand story and force you to make decisions about your website’s priorities.

An example of a card sorting exercise to create a hierarchy of brand messages
A bar graph depicting outcomes from a card sorting exercise to help create a hierarchy of brand messages
St. John’s University’s “big tent” approach to engaging campus stakeholders in their website refresh project resulted in the website brand message architecture influencing the viewbook and other non-digital publications. Here are excerpts from our virtual workshopping process with SJU.​​​​​

It’s also important to note that brand message architecture helps guide more purposeful communication across your organization — because your brand is more than the headline in your homepage hero. This work becomes a lever to shape all sorts of content across your site, from big impact headlines to financial aid processes and everything in between.

But it’s worth noting that a brand message architecture is not going to look like the big fat deck you might get from a branding firm. It does not address visual identity or wordmarks. It does not distill your brand essence into personality attributes, positioning statements, and myriad other elements. It is first and foremost a guidepost for your web content, with the potential to extend influence to other platforms as is relevant.

Creating a Brand Message Architecture — Card Sorts, Workshops, and More

At OHO, our approach is adapted from the BrandSort process pioneered by content strategist and branding consultant Margot Bloomstein. (Bloomstein wrote extensively about her approach in her 2012 book, “Content Strategy at Work.”)

We facilitate a collaborative attribute sorting exercise with key web content stakeholders and brand owners (usually no more than a half dozen or so). This exercise asks participants to consider three key questions — who are you (meaning, how are you currently perceived), who are you not, and who do you want to be? 

Out of that exercise, we identify messaging clusters and refine those into key messages with supporting themes — enriched with organizational context and nuance by virtue of our workshop approach. 

An example of brand messaging displayed on Columbia Law School's website
Our website redesign discovery and user research with Columbia Law School found that people valued the premier law school’s Manhattan location and the vibrant community on campus. This heavily influenced our brand message architecture, which elevated previously understated messages around the school’s location and student body. This prominent element on the homepage reinforces both of those messages.

Our overall project strategy — including user research and discovery findings and the website’s defined goals and audiences — also fundamentally shapes the direction our brand message architecture work takes.

How Do You Use a Brand Message Architecture?

We call a brand message architecture the DNA of your content strategy for a reason — once you have your messaging defined, reinforced by a clear sense of goals and audience, you have a powerful foundation upon which to create targeted digital communications. 

A brand message architecture should be an ongoing internal reference for your content teams,  guiding the development of website copy and visual content by establishing priority, emphasis, and direction. 

You can use your brand message architecture to shape editorial decisions about news content and brand storytelling — consider tagging key message themes in your editorial calendar to track relevance and identify gaps or opportunities as they arise.

When conducting regular content audits and planning revisions, your brand message architecture can serve as a reference to gauge alignment.

A screenshot from the University of South Dakota's site where they emphasized regional excellence.
One of our key messages for the University of South Dakota emphasized regional excellence. That’s reflected in the prominence of these rankings on their homepage.

Brand message architecture may not be the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The messages yielded from this work are not intended to be used as headlines in your homepage hero or billboard. They are not meant to be dropped directly into web copy. And they are not a vision or mission statement for your organization.

But by defining the hierarchy of communications goals for your web content, you create a powerful sense of focus that will yield a consistent and compelling narrative, making your website a powerful and strategic communications tool.