The Comms Equation (Goal → People → Action → Belief → Medium)
Back-solve every comms plan from a business goal, never from an impressions target.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
Meservey's antidote to 'measuring vibes': a backward chain that starts at a business goal (revenue, penetration) rather than a communications goal (impressions, virality). From the goal you derive which people must take which action, then what those people must believe in order to take it, then where they reside intellectually so you can deliver that belief. The output is a testable equation: deliver this message, to these people, through these mediums, to trigger this action.
Origin
Lulu Cheng Meservey's own formulation, developed to bring OKR-style discipline to comms — a discipline she notes is otherwise unmeasurable relative to data-driven functions.
Core principles
- 01The goal must be a business goal, never a comms goal — 'go viral' is not a goal.
- 02Belief precedes action; you must reverse-engineer the belief, not the slogan.
- 03Every message needs a call to action attached to a named audience.
- 04Discipline in comms comes from making the chain explicit enough to falsify.
- 05Without the chain, you are 'just saying words into the ether'.
How to run it
- 1
State the business goal in numbers
Write the actual commercial outcome: grow revenue by X, reach Y% penetration in this user base. Explicitly reject impressions, follower counts and virality as goals.
Watch out If your goal contains the word 'awareness', you have not finished this step.
- 2
Derive who must do what, in what quantity
Work out which type of person, in what number, must take which concrete action for the goal to be met — e.g. this many people of this type must buy these sneakers.
- 3
Write the belief stack that unlocks the action
List everything that person must believe before they will act. For the sneaker example: that their feet are uncomfortable now, that more comfort is possible, that it would improve their life, and that this new sneaker technology is real.
Pro tip Each belief in the stack is a separate message; a single ad rarely installs all four.
Watch out A missing belief in the stack silently blocks the action no matter how much reach you buy.
- 4
Locate where they reside intellectually
Identify the accounts they follow, the podcasts they listen to, the newspapers they read, the conferences they attend — the channels through which each belief can actually be delivered.
- 5
Assemble and execute the equation
Compose it as one sentence: we deliver [these beliefs] to [these people] through [these mediums] with [this call to action] in order to produce [the action] that hits [the business goal]. Then run it, and evaluate against the goal, not against likes.
Pro tip Because the chain is explicit, a miss can be diagnosed at a specific link (wrong belief? wrong channel? wrong audience?) instead of blamed on 'bad PR'.
In the wild
Meservey's worked example: the business goal is a revenue number. That requires N people of a specific type to buy the sneakers. For them to buy, they must believe their feet are currently uncomfortable, that comfort is achievable, that it will improve their life, and that the new sneaker technology is real. Those four beliefs then get routed through the exact podcasts, accounts and publications those people inhabit.
→ The comms team ends up with a delivery plan tied to revenue rather than a press-hit wish list — and knows precisely which belief failed if the sales don't come.
NYX (a L'Oréal division) spends, as far as Meservey knows, zero dollars on marketing and puts all budget and effort into influencers. The chain: buyers must believe a specific human's eyelid looks great and that this eyeliner produces it. So the message is delivered by humans, with a call to action, in the places those buyers already live.
→ A completely fungible product — a plain black eyeliner — sells out at CVS stores across the country for weeks on the strength of the human-delivered message.
Common mistakes
Setting a comms goal instead of a business goal
'Get this many impressions' or 'go viral' cannot be back-solved into beliefs or actions, so the entire chain collapses into vibes.
Jumping straight to the message
Writing copy before naming the belief stack means you optimise for what sounds good rather than what unlocks the purchase.
Right message, wrong habitat
Perfect beliefs delivered where the audience does not intellectually reside is words into the ether — the last link of the chain is not optional.
Is it for you?
Best for
Comms leads and founders who are asked to justify PR spend against business outcomes and need a chain they can defend in an OKR review.
Not ideal for
Purely reactive crisis response, where the sequence is dictated by events rather than a planned business goal.
From the transcript
“when you have your business goal you're going to need certain people to do certain things for that goal to come true”
“the next step is what do they need to believe in order to take that action”
“then it's where do they reside intellectually like how do you deliver that message to them”
From the episode
Navigating comms and PR
Lulu Cheng Meservey (Substack, Activision Blizzard)