Lulu Cheng Meservey
Lulu Cheng Meservey was formerly head of comms at Substack (where I host my newsletter and podcast) and is currently the Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Chief Communications Officer at Activision Blizzard. She also writes one of my favorite newsletters, “Flack,” where she shares tactical advice for company comms, PR, and messaging.
Discovery & Research Skills
Focus limited communication resources on your natural audience by aligning your message with their specific, pre-existing interests.
"There's going to be people who are just not your natural audience, and you should know that and not waste your time. But if your natural audience cares about X and you're offering Y, then it's your jo..."
Launch & Go-to-Market Skills
A powerful communication strategy distills a complex mission into a jargon-free essence before enhancing it with memorable imagery.
"So if you were to boil down the essence of let's say your company or your mission, get it to one sentence and then turn it into a sentence that you could explain to a second-grader, and then cleanse i..."
Strategy & Positioning Skills
Messaging is most effective when it bridges the gap between what you offer and what your audience already cares about, rather than attempting to change their beliefs.
"So it's a huge lift to try to change someone's worldview or their passions. It's a light lift to take the thing you want to talk about and just shape it into, to fit into their worldview or their pass..."
To make an idea spread organically, it must be packaged to minimize cognitive burden and provide social value to the person sharing it.
"And so a few things that you can do with an idea to make it spread better, you can make it into a joke, so you can turn it into a line that people will repeat. You can use an analogy, you can take som..."