Communication Strategist

The Communication Strategist is the third of four in the Strategy phase. It reads your Goals KRs and Audience personas, then produces a creative brief addressed to copy and art leads. The pillar names carry through to the Media Strategist, which maps every channel back to one of them.

What it does

The Communication output is a campaign-level creative brief organised into four parts.

The output opens with three named Communication Pillars that frame the campaign's strategic logic. Each pillar pairs with a principle (the underlying rationale that forces it) and a short prose explanation of how the campaign must deliver on it. Pillar names carry verbatim into the Media Strategist, where every channel maps back to one of them.

A dedicated Persona Brief follows for each priority persona, each containing:

• The Big Idea: an italicised provocation that sets up a tension and collapses it, followed by a short paragraph on why it lands for this persona.
• Strategic Framework: a Mermaid flowchart that lays out Mark Pollard's Edge–Problem–Strategy–Insight model for the persona.
• Reasons to Believe: three proof points, each a bold lead phrase followed by copywriter-quotable evidence.
• Creative Territory: three short paragraphs labelled Register (the voice and cultural space the brand should adopt), Cast (who appears and how they're attributed), and Avoid (named clichés the campaign must escape, each with a reason).
• Campaign Expressions: a small table of creative expressions for the persona (mediums like Hero Film, Interactive Tool, Static Series, or Thought Leadership, not channels), each with a strategic role and a copywriter-voice headline and support line.

A short Strategic Considerations section lists three campaign-level risks or dependencies, each ending in a concrete posture: what to do, what to flag, what to scope from the start. At least one item names a KR-activation dependency by the KR's substantive name.

A closing What Creative Should Come Back With section lays out what the first creative review should contain: typically a defended territory direction, headline systems for the campaign expressions, and a 'what we're not' reference deck. For markets where the dominant audience language differs from English, it also asks for a vernacular treatment for two flagship expressions per persona.

Where to find it

Navigate to Strategy inside any brand or campaign (Research must be complete). Communication is the third of four strategist tabs. A full Strategy run takes around 8-10 minutes; Communication takes roughly 2 minutes of that.

How it works

The strategists run in sequence: Goals, then Audience, then Communication. Communication reads the Goals KR table and all three Audience personas, plus the brand profile, campaign brief, and the full Research output (Consumer, Competitor, Culture, Social, and the Research one-pager). Attached documents are read first. Web research fills remaining gaps, capped at five calls.

The strategist writes for creative partners. It describes what each piece of the work needs to do (the role it plays in the campaign) and stops short of prescribing execution. Camera angles, fonts, colour palettes, and layouts are out of scope by design; they belong to the creative team that picks up the brief.

What you can adjust

Campaign brief: Named audiences, clear positioning statements, and defined competitive tensions give the strategist what it needs to make pillars distinctive and persona briefs sharp.

Document attachment: Brand platforms, past campaign debriefs, or segmentation studies attached from the Documents page feed directly into pillar framing and persona briefs.

Refine: Use the Refine button after a run. Refining Communication re-runs only this strategist (Media may also re-run downstream). Refining Goals or Audience may trigger Communication to re-run too. Prior versions stay in history. See Refine.

Limits and considerations

• The output is built around three pillars. Narrow single-message campaigns can read thin if the strategist has to stretch to three distinct pillars. Review each pillar's principle and refine the Communication output if any pillar reads as descriptive rather than load-bearing.
• Pillar names propagate downstream. Media Strategist reads them verbatim. Approve the names before running Media, or refine Communication first.
• One brief per priority persona. Audience produces three priority personas; Communication produces three persona briefs.
• Strategic Framework is a strategic diagram, not a storyboard. The flowchart argues why the strategy works for the persona. Creative interprets it visually; the strategist does not prescribe execution.
• Diagrams export with the document. Strategic Framework flowcharts render on the Strategy page and carry through to PDF, Word, and Markdown exports. See Exports & sharing for format-specific behavior.
• Beta software. The pillar framework and persona brief structure are opinionated. Validate before briefing creative or media partners.