Netflix is reportedly offering upwards of $775,000 to fill a position it’s billing as Director of Product & Technology Communications. OpenAI, meanwhile, wants to pay a Head of Business Communications $430,000, plus equity. They’re willing to dole out such sums to talented communicators who can develop their corporate narrative and tell the companies’ most compelling stories in varying ways according to different target audiences.
The execs who will fill these positions will find plenty of people internally who can produce content, buy ads, brief the media, and manage internal communications. But what they probably won’t find is employees with built-in knowledge of their different audiences, or who have the time to learn about them. It’s not enough to just have different content producers churning out one-size-fits-all messaging. They need to bring in expert journalists and communications consultants who know how to research each targeted audience segment, and can adapt editorial content appropriately.
What’s the story?
Let’s use Homer’s The Odyssey to understand how a story can be moulded for different audiences. When he conceived his epic poem around the 8th century BC, Homer’s audience was given the opportunity to celebrate and examine the values of Greek culture at the time, such as loyalty and cunning. Emily Wilson, in her acclaimed 2017 English translation, wanted to give more agency to the story’s female characters, emphasising gender and power. With Christopher Nolan’s recent film, our modern viewership sees a story that focuses on memory and the psychological toll that war takes on soldiers.
Each of these talented literary artists used the poem’s basic storylines as a vehicle to express certain ideas to their audiences. In the same way, an experienced team of journalists and communications experts can take a business’s corporate messaging — one that has been fleshed out with key details that make it unique, trustworthy, and backed by solid data and proof points — and then emphasise or de-emphasise those details depending on the intended audience. For example, maybe growth and expansion are the key message for one, while capital discipline works for another, and innovation pipeline plays for a third. The crucial factor is putting the right external team in place who can dedicate the necessary time and take a journalistic approach toward understanding a specific industry and mega-trends shaping markets, and make content that is genuinely interesting to the given audience.
Three industries, multiple stories
Here’s how a core message might play out across different industries.
In luxury, a brand’s craftsmanship and authenticity should be primary messages where legacy is the key selling point. But some might read heritage as dated, so for such an audience, innovation or exclusivity should be stressed. The sustainability dimension of that same story tends to split along geography. Southern European audiences often respond more to the social and care side of a sustainability commitment. Northern European audiences are more attached to the environmental case.
What about tech? An AI strategy story has to serve three audiences that rarely overlap: customers wanting reliability and safety, employees wanting purpose and a credible growth path, regulators wanting governance and transparency. Lead with the wrong one and the same true story reads as hollow marketing or an unintended admission of risk.
Finally, in health, an innovation-in-care story needs a clinical-evidence lead for payers and regulators, a compassion-and-outcomes lead for patients, and a mission-and-resilience lead for a workforce more likely asking about burnout than breakthroughs.
Eliminating guesswork
How do you determine what’s going to move a given market? It can’t just be a “feeling” for your audience, and you can’t just rely on some overarching message for all. To really know which dimension will move a market or segment, you need to do the deep audience intelligence work that will quantify which key points will carry the most weight. The idea is to know what you need to lead with to move your audience before a single piece of content gets written. The Editorialist’s Founder & CEO Agathe Giros described this process in depth in her article entitled Audience intelligence: how to collect it, how to use it, and how to succeed with it.
Leveraging AI to get the most out of your playbook
A storytelling strategy that lives only in a year-end deck gets briefed once, then forgotten by the third market activation. What gets used is a playbook: the main stories, their dimensions, a map of which dimension leads where — in each market, and in each audience — plus a roadmap tying each story to the channels and moments where it should appear.
But even a playbook might get overlooked or become too cumbersome over time. That’s why a structured, AI-readable version should be loaded into a company’s own internal tools. In this way, a local comms lead in Germany can get a grounded answer to the question of what dimension of the sustainability story they should lead with for their country’s B2B audience — without having to check in with corporate first. Of course, this only works if teams have been trained to use AI and the playbook together.
How to plan ahead for 2027
Get the team together to workshop ideas and key messaging. Conduct an audience study, as well, one that shows, market by market, which dimension of each story is worth leading with. Determine the strengths and weaknesses of your brand, and of your key messages, so you can address those weaker points and accentuate the stronger ones. Once those dimensions are defined, your playbook, roadmap, and AI-readable version are ready for development.
