How to treat your messaging as a practice rather than a project
A lesson from Whitechapel Gallery's new appointment
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Londonâs Whitechapel Gallery recently announced the appointment of their first ever Economist in Residence, Mariana Mazzucato. Her role is to âexamine the role of cultural institutions in an era of rising costs and declining fundingâ. In the midst of the cost of living crisis, it is her job to better communicate the value that the gallery brings to potential funders and visitors.
The appointment reminded me how fundamental it is to creative businesses of any size to continue to test new ways to communicate the value of the work you do. Never more so than in the year of the eternal shit show 2026.
This question lies at the core of the work I do with one person businesses who sell creative services:
âhow do I talk about what I do in a way that will attract and convert my ideal clients?â
If youâve worked for a company bigger than your one person business before, messaging was probably treated as a one and done exercise. Something to work with an agency on, group think a mediocre tagline, then hope it stuck.
As a solo business owner, âmessagingâ is less of a one time thing and more of an ongoing conversation between you and the other brands/clients/competitors/collaborators in your ecosystem. The reality of how you are perceived by the market is what matters, not how you write about your work in a Slides deck buried deep in your Drive.
There is a magic, juicy, beautiful sweet spot where what you communicate and what your ideal client perceives as something that excites them and that theyâd like to pay for click as one. In startup land youâd call it finding product market fit.
Your message is shaped by bouncing against the edges of what lands and what doesnât, and is clarified over time through ongoing iteration. In other words, your message is sharpened and solidified by sharing your ideas.
This is an iterative process that requires you to test out different ways of talking about what you do.
So how can you approach messaging as a practice?
Know what youâre doing here. Before anything else, get clear on what you're actually trying to achieve. What do you want to happen as a result of what you are communicating on or offline?
Ground your message in who you are and what you stand for. Why do you care about your work? What is common practice in your industry that you hate? With solid foundations that donât shake, you can play around with the messages around what you âdoâ.
Prioritise momentum over perfection. Throw away all ideas of âshouldâ. Thereâs nowhere you should be and no way you should be showing up in certain spaces. Playing with words, formats, platforms and ideas is how youâll find what clicks.
Set input rather than output goals. Set targets on things within your control (e.g. writing one Substack per week) not things entirely out of it (like going viral).
Lower the stakes. See each piece of content you create - a website page, a Substack post, a video - as one tiny piece of a jigsaw puzzle that you are building. If something lands, ask what you can learn from that. If it doesnât, no one saw it anyway.
Know that youâll feel less cringe in time. If you donât feel cringe when you start sharing your ideas online, youâre not sharing interesting or honest enough ideas. But sharing ideas is a muscle that you strengthen over time to the point where you stop feeling like you want to throw your phone in the toilet after pressing post and may even, whisper it, start to enjoy it.
Mariana Mazzucato has been appointed for a three year tenure at Whitechapel. I can only imagine how many different angles she will find in the data over that time to communicate the value of what the gallery does. As you shape your message, give yourself permission to think in this kind of time horizon too.
Chat soon
Matilda x
As I am preparing for my second self employed maternity leave this summer, my books are currently closed for new consulting clients! You can sign up for the autumn Creative Growth Sprint waitlist here đ. Broken Growth newsletters will continue <3
Love this, and how curious with Whitechapelâs economist role!