One thing about effective messaging that is key for any business is consistency. Together with ‘clear’ and ‘concise’, it’s part of the three Cs of great communication (I’d be tempted to add a fourth C – creative – to that list).

Your mission…should you choose to repeat it
I thought about this while absorbing the latest UK local government election results and it made me think that a big problem for the Labour government is the lack of consistency when it comes to their messaging.

When coming to power in July 2024, they made a great noise about their “mission-driven” government. But when was the last time you heard any of the government’s front bench politicians talk about those five missions so carefully laid out?

Of course, you might argue that the original mission-driven messaging here was too vague or disparate, but that’s not really the point I want to make: if the spokespeople don’t keep their discipline and the communication advisers allow the focus on their original messaging to be lost, no one – least of all the intended audience – really knows what the key messages are.

Forget me not
I think it’s a major problem for any organisation or business that builds a message platform which quickly gets forgotten, or subsumed by some other idea that similarly falls by the wayside.

I see it with the development of company values: often there are too many and they change too frequently. Try asking people in the business if they can tell you what the company values are and their inability to repeat them might surprise you – that’s a failure right there of the four Cs of great communication.

What do you stand for?
This is not a post about the political rights or wrongs of the current government, but it is a post about the need to be ruthlessly consistent about what it is that as a person, a business, or an organisation you stand for.