No wonder the media turns a deaf ear to PR messaging. The "messages" are usually sales pitches masquerading as news, or semantic cesspools brewed from overused buzzwords. It's the media's job to ridicule such tripe, not write about it.

It's our job as PR professionals to pierce this skepticism with messages that appeal to journalistic instincts instead of aggravating them. Persuasive media messaging is an art form made up of ¼-part research, ¼-part education ¼-part psychology and ¼-part creativity. It engages the media's thirst for the new, the different, the quirky, and the story behind the story. And beyond scoring good coverage, strong media messaging unifies often dissonant corporate messaging - the curious inability many companies have to answer the questions "who are you, what do you do and why do I care?" with anything resembling simplicity and unanimity. That's when messaging shows its full value as a strategic asset that permeates a whole company and its stakeholders.

Beaupre & Co. created a powerful, strategic positioning methodology called Dynamic Messaging^SM in 1995 to tackle this issue. Dynamic Messaging is a creative methodology that enables us to develop compelling differentiation, positioning and language that breaks clients out of the competitive pack. It cuts through all the noise and confusion that currently confounds the media, leaving an indelible image in their heads, while addressing their #1 litmus test: "Why should my readers care about you?"

Our Dynamic Messaging recommendations are often highly strategic, resulting in fundamental shifts in product strategy, market focus or competitive alignment, to name a few. For example, we've created entirely new market categories for our clients which the media, competitors and even Wall Street instantly embraced. We've turned service-based companies into product companies by creating products out of underlying technologies they didn't realize held legitimate value. We've even rebranded companies when the situation warranted it, driven by this methodology.

Dynamic Messaging yields a suite of adaptive messages that deposition competitors, while creating a single, memorable identity for our clients. For example, it worked for a Beaupre & Co. start-up client that couldn't get the media interested in a breakthrough technology; they described it so technically the media couldn't understand it...the words and concepts presented were too abstract.

The Dynamic Messaging methodology distilled the technology down to the idea of a traffic cop-like device called a "Web switch." Within weeks after our client adopted the Web switch position, the media embraced it as a category, competitors adopted it and even Wall Street recognized it. The client went on to have one of 2000's biggest IPOs and was acquired in a $5 billion dollar plus deal.

Other examples of our company-shaping messaging recommendations have included:

• Positioning an upstart open source database vendor as a competitive threat: "our client will do to the database giants what Red Hat Linux did to Microsoft - give the world a formidable open source alternative to world domination."
• Creating a new web service billing concept called "molecular billing" which the media embraced as an intriguing, emerging market phenomenon. Once the concept was accepted by the media, it enabled the client to position itself as a major player addressing this issue.
• Diversifying a client that had two unrelated product lines - one a portal creation tool; the other a CAD configuration tool - into two distinct virtual corporations.

Dynamic Messaging is a five-phase methodology made up of:

• research
• problem solving
• corporate messaging
• soundbite messaging
• message delivery training

All good PR strategy starts with durable, defensible messaging. Beaupre & Co.'s Dynamic Messaging methodology has broken through the media's skepticism by creating unique, simple and memorable identities. It has shaped how the firm's clients talk and think about themselves, permeating every internal and external communication program from media relations to employee relations to product and corporate marketing. In those cases it has fattened checkbooks as effectively as it has clip books, proving that the simplest skill - knowing how to talk about yourself - is also the most crucial.