The Semester I Stopped Guessing What to Say in FH-Joanneum

When I started the program, I thought I already knew what “good content” meant. I’d written enough captions, edited enough copy, and rewritten enough “About Us” pages to trust my gut. Content felt intuitive. You look at a brand, you feel its vibe, you write something that matches. Done.

Then came Message Architecture.

I remember sitting in our first session thinking, okay, this is going to be another vocabulary lesson. Tone. Voice. Personality. I’d heard it all. But the subject wasn’t about labels. It was about something quieter and more uncomfortable: the realization that most of us, most of the time, are just guessing.

"Three Steps to Developing a Brand-driven Content Strategy" contentstrategy.at

New point of view

At one point we did a card sort — dozens of adjectives laid out, and the task was to sort them into “who we are,” “who we aspire to be,” and “who we’re not.” It sounds simple. It is not simple.

The first shock was how hard it is to let go of words. Everyone wants to be innovative, trustworthy, expert, approachable, bold. Of course they do. But if you’re all of those things at once, you’re nothing in particular. The sort forces trade-offs — and trade-offs force honesty.

The second shock was how much disagreement sits inside a single team. We weren’t even working on a real client and we still couldn’t align. That was the lesson, actually: misaligned content isn’t a writing problem, it’s a decisions problem. If three people around a table can’t agree on who the brand is, no amount of polishing a headline will fix it.

Before this semester, I treated content like decoration — something you apply on top of a finished product. After this semester, I see content as infrastructure. The words aren’t the last step; they’re the scaffolding everyone else builds on. Designers, developers, marketers, product folks — they’re all standing on whatever foundation the messaging gives them. If it wobbles, everything wobbles.

I also stopped trusting my gut quite so much. Not because intuition is wrong, but because intuition scales badly. It works when I’m writing one caption. It fails the moment a team of ten needs to write in the same voice across a website, a newsletter, a help doc, and a product interface. Message architecture is what turns individual taste into a shared system.

I used to start writing projects by asking, what do I want to say? Now I start by asking, what are we — and what are we not? It’s a small reframe. It changes everything downstream.

One semester in, and I already feel like I’m a different kind of writer. Not more talented. More deliberate. Less performative. Willing to throw away words that sound nice because they don’t belong to the brand, the audience, or the moment.