Message vs. audience

From my reading on Wednesday, which was more Climate War (Pooley), more stuff on environmental messaging strategy. Pooley describes the Alliance for Climate Protection's initial messaging strategy, which was intended to build their "brand" and establish them as a known, non-threatening brand (the Alliance is the group Al Gore spearheads):

They had established the brand but their message was getting buried under a mountain of look-alike ads from fossil fuel companies. In the Alliance's tracking polls, the percentage of people who saw the crisis as urgent was starting to fall off because of all of those oil, gas, and coal ads saying, It's solvable. Don't worry about it. We're on it. ExxonMobil had people in lab coats in their ads, and Americans trust scientists and technicians. The clean coal people had an "I believe" spot that looked and felt like an Obama commercial.

There are multiple kinds of strategy a messager can apply to messaging. One is the kind I talked about earlier, where, in essence, you fit the people to the message - you pick the people who will be receptive to the kind of message you want to send. This is the other kind, in which you fit the message to the people. My intuition is that the second kind is inherently less effective: anyone can do it, and it's unclear that one message fitted to a given audience is likely to be more sticky than another (whereas a message targeted at a group that is particularly prone to be receptive to that message may be very sticky indeed). If true, this is likely to be especially true of messages like the one described above, for the reason described above: whatever is catchy about a message targeted to many people at once is also likely vague enough to be easily imitated by competitors.

This is of course one of the many areas tangential to what I'm working on where I end up thinking, "There's probably research out there on this concept already," but don't actually have the time to follow up, since it is, in fact, tangential.