How do you consider messaging hierarchy in the messaging of the product?

Messaging is made up of two equally important components - Brand and Product.

Brand messaging encompasses the product, vision, market, customers, culture, and more. It can be much more aspirational and future-facing. This is normally owned by corporate marketing, or maybe you have a specific brand team that cultivates this message.

Product messaging (as you can probably guess) is solely focused on the product. More specifically, it speaks to the problems your product is solving, who you are solving it for, and the impact it has on those personas and their business. While there is some room for future-facing vision, it is much more grounded in reality than a brand message and is often connected to a roadmap. This is what Product Marketing typically owns. 

For Product messaging, there are several frameworks you can use. But the best that I have seen start telling a high-level story, and then drill down into specific personas, pain points, features, and impacts. To keep it easy, think about what you want your website to look like. What are the top value props you would want on the home page? And if someone liked what they saw and clicked on your product page, how would you go one level deeper? What use cases would you want to showcase? Which features speak best to that use case that you can show in a short video? Rather than throwing everything into product messaging, you can get more bang for your buck by focusing on these key stories and then building from there.

I do think it's important to ladder your product positioning into the broader product portfolio and/or company message. I've talked about the 6 components of your positioning (Product Name, Category Name, Target Audience, Key Benefits, Key Differentiators, and Reasons to Believe)... when reflecting on your Reason to Believe, I feel like there is often something in there that will tie back to your broader product portfolio and/or company message. Let's take HubSpot as an example. HubSpot's mission is to help millions of companies "grow better". As a company and as a product, HubSpot deeply values the customer experience and believes in putting long-term relationships ahead of short-term gains. There a lot of ways to dig into and interpret "grow better", but we'd challenge ourselves to really think about how this ethos and core part of our company and our brand ties back to the individual product. In the case of our sales product, Sales Hub, we ended up zeroing in on this idea that if you can focus on your customers, instead of your systems, you'll be able to grow better. That was our brand tie in and reason to believe, and ultimately this ended up being applicable to HubSpot's portfolio as a whole. 

For product messaging, I tend to prioritize and focus on the benefit promise that the product delivers and the key benefits and features that support that benefit promise. If I try to also account for the brand message, it makes the product message less specific and less impactful. You may lose out on communicating the exact pain the product solves for as well.

Where I do take into account the company and brand promise is in the communication of the 'why' (e.g. why now) as well as in actual messaging that is used in creative. For example, the intro paragraph of my product page could be tied to the company message or brand message but then leads the reader into how the product ultimately addresses their problems. Therefore when creating the product messaging brief, I usually focus primarily on the product benefits and features.

When i think messaging, its rarely about the product. Great messaging serves to acknowledge/alleviate the user problem first. Given that lens, it makes sense to introduce hierarchy in terms of the user needs - at the top level, i think about what's the biggest/most important problem we solve for the user, and then we start building sub layers of messaging that speak to the component problems that ladder up to the bigger problem.