Comms Strategist

The Comms Strategist is the third of four in the Strategy phase. It reads your Goals KRs and Audience personas, then produces a Communications Strategy around three named messaging pillars. Those names carry into Media Strategist, which maps every tactic back to them.

What it does

The output is a messaging architecture, not ad copy. Six sections:

Executive Summary — a ~130-150 word synthesis of problem, positioning, competitor posture, and the three pillar names. Closes with a one-line Comms Imperative.

Strategic Foundation — the three messaging pillars in a table mapping each to its role in communication, primary KR, and identity framing. Each pillar is a single word or short alliterative phrase.

Campaign Alignment — flat bullets covering dates, strategic focus, comms approach, and target audience.

Storytelling Frameworks — one section per Audience persona. Each includes a strategic-leap flowchart for that persona, a table of three functional hooks with taglines, a table of three bolder creative bets, and a triggers-and-tone table mapping emotional signals to messaging register.

Media & Creative Principles — five guardrails covering visual identity, copy approach, creative tone, persona-format alignment, and format adaptation. Budget, channel splits, and flighting are not here; those belong to Media Strategist.

Strategic Considerations — five insights linking market dynamics, pillar activation, and persona implications, each with a supporting data point.

Where to find it

Navigate to Strategy inside any brand or campaign (Research must be complete). Comms is the third of four strategist tabs (labelled "Communication" in the tab bar). A full Strategy run takes around 10-12 minutes; Comms takes roughly 2-3 minutes of that.

How it works

The strategists run in sequence: Goals, then Audience, then Comms. Comms reads the Goals KR table and all three Audience personas, plus the brand profile, campaign brief, and Research consumer, competitor, and culture outputs. Attached documents are read first. Web research fills remaining gaps, capped at five calls.

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.

Document attachment — Brand platforms, past campaign debrefs, or segmentation studies attached from the Documents page feed directly into pillar framing and persona approaches.

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

Limits and known issues

• Three pillars is the fixed structure. If your campaign has a single core message, the strategist may stretch to fill three. Review pillar logic before briefing creative teams.
• Pillar names propagate downstream. Media Strategist reads them verbatim. Approve the names before running Media, or refine Comms first.
• Persona count mirrors Audience output. Three personas always produce three storytelling framework sections.
• Diagrams export with the document. Strategic-leap diagrams render on the Strategy page and carry through to PDF, Word, and Markdown exports. See Exports & sharing for format-specific behavior.
• Beta software. The 3-pillar framework is opinionated. Validate pillar logic and persona framing before briefing creative or media partners.