It’s hard to summarize what we do, for whom, and what makes us different in a concise way. Whether you’re trying to raise funds for a new business, or have an existing business up and running, a concise articulation of what you’re all about can be the difference between the cold shoulder and a conversation. In this post I’ll share two exercises that can help you, and your team, get the point across to potential clients.
To be clear, I’m not proposing that you have a canned sixty second spiel that you say over and over again. What I’m really after is a set of building blocks that you can fit together on the fly based on who you’re talking to. These exercises are focused on identifying your most engaging building blocks and learning how they fit together. In the end, you should have greater fluency telling stories that resonate with potential clients or customers.
Elevator Pitch Exercise #1
This exercise is designed for teams of 4 or more participants. In the template below, use the top text boxes, each participant should summarize 4 interesting ideas or concepts that relate to your companies’ work and title each idea. In the bottom text box, cite a real world example of how the idea has impacted the business. If relevant, indicate where the idea came from, and where it can be researched further. Once complete cut this sheet on the dotted lines and see if it’s possible to identify groups or categories between all your ideas. These ideas can now serve as the basis for your pitches’ building blocks. It is also helpful to identify which ideas compliment each other, which ones flow together, and if there are better business examples to cite for each idea. Click on the image below to download a PDF worksheet:
Here’s a quick example of what one entry might look like:
TITLE: Fail Fast
SUMMARY: Many companies, and internal teams, are afraid to fail. In reality failing fast, and often, is one of the best ways to set a course for successful innovation
EXAMPLE: When we were looking for ways to improve customer service, we focused our energy on lightweight service programs that we could prototype before committing to a direction. This approach allowed us to try a few ideas that seemed a bit crazy, but which turned out to be key to changing the way customer service is done in our industry. The result was that we set a new best practice.
Elevator Pitch Exercise #2
This exercise is designed for teams of 4 or more participants, though the best results are achieved with larger groups. Each should fill out a copy of the worksheet. Once all the worksheets are complete, draw out a chart with columns for each entry field on the worksheet. Review each worksheet and add it’s content your chart. When complete, remove duplicate entries and look for new combinations that improve the pitch. Variations of this exercise are fairly common and are based on a Mad Lib approach to writing pitches. Click on the image below to download a PDF worksheet:
Here’s a quick example of what one entry might look like:
Hello, I’m Roland. I work with Smart Method Consulting. We help companies with active online user bases by leveraging their communities to improve and promote their products. Our customers include both service and product companies, such as Adaptive Path who were dissatisfied with traditional community management apporaches. Our service includes a social media and technical audit that provides an online communications strategy and roadmap. Unike larger full-service marketing firms we offer a marketing 2.0 approach that is focused on customer satisfaction and product innovation.
Wrap Up
Once these exercises are complete you’ll want to get some practice combining your building blocks. Whenever possible, try to lead the conversation towards specific stories about real people and measurable results. Use your pitch to lead into a short case study. Like your pitches you’ll want to be familiar with enough of your case studies to have something appropriate on tap. If you’re interested in learning more about how the write and prioritize case studies read my earlier blog post about that here.
Whether you’re starting a new venture, or need to upgrade your existing brand, the best place to start is to simply articulate what you’re looking for in a design brief. This post features a creative brief outline that has worked well for me in the past. Two quick notes before I jump in:
It’s Only an Outline – The outline below is fairly straight forward and is designed as the starting point to a significant conversation about the creative work of branding. Filling in the outlines may require some serious soul searching for your organization, in combination with some exercises, but that’s not the focus of this post.
It’s For You Too – The design brief is as much for you as it is for your creative team. In other words, starting a creative brief is about being prepared before engaging a creative team. It’ll save you time, communicate that you’re organized and professional, and raise the bar for the relationship. Once the conversation gets started your creative team with typically iterate, improve, and possibly re-articulate the brief based on additional questions and clarifications.
Also, a big thanks to Jon Scheuning over at Pentagram who got me thinking about this when he shared a creative brief outline that he uses with me last year.
Let’s Clarify Some Terms
People use the word “branding” to mean differnt things. This is what I mean:
Re-Brand – This is when a product or service that is sold under one brand switches it’s affiliation to a new brand. Often the goal here is to reposition the product or move upmarket.
Brand Refresh – This is when an existing brand has fallen out of date and requires reworking to update it to contemporary standards. Brand refresh can be a regular review process to evolve a brand to reflect market change.
Brand Re-Staging – This is similar to a brand refresh, but is more focused on altering the context and supporting brand elements associated with the brand in order to evolve it. For example a brand identity mark, or logo, may remain essentially the same while the supporting brand elements (pallet, patterns, secondary elements, backgrounds, etc) can change significantly.
Structure for The Brief
The creative brief anticipates a series of high level questions, so each section is positioned as an answer to a question. I’ve thrown in some sample answers to give you the gist of what good answers might look like. As a general rule, keep the language as active and as concise as possible.
What we want (what are your highest level goals?)
Develop our identity system to support our next stage of growth.
Make the system, and its associated assets, accessible, thus enabling consistent application.
How it will help our business (what are the expected business impacts of this project?)
Drive consistent brand experience across touch-points.
Build on existing brand equity and support line extension.
What we’ll get (what are the deliverables at the end of the project?)
A re-staged brand identity that
includes a broader visual vocabulary than the current system.
A style guide, including
a color palette set,
primary and secondary type faces,
imagery,
a series of exhibits and templates,
a selection of sample applications including _____, ______, ________.
a set of brand guidelines, to help our internal team apply the system across a variety of media.
Some Boundaries (are there any limits, or major specifications, that we must incorporate?)
The brand mark will be used extensively in rich media and must be able to support animation builds.
Who this is for (tell us about your target market?)
Our services are targeted to _______ audiences, here’s how they typically discover our brand, here’s how they perceive us now, etc.
Here are the markets we’d like to move into, here’s how we’d like to gain brand awareness in this area, etc
Make the right impression (how do you want people to respond to your brand?)
Our business is complicated and hard to explain, we want a brand that will support simpler communications.
Different communities interpret our brand differently, which causes problems. We’d want a brand that is perceived more consistently.
We want something that lets people know that we’re committed to doing well by doing good.
We’ll know it worked when (how will we know if it worked?)
To be successful, the restaged brand identity system should:
increase perceived value of our brand and recognition through internal surveying,
increase consistency across communications, and
win strong internal buy-in.
Who we are (can you summarize what your brand is about?)
Our company was founded in ______ by _______ with a strong record for ________. We have grown into ________. As we grew, we developed a logo, and used it to put our stamp on identity materials across a variety of media. To this point, these materials have served our needs, in part because ________. Recently, we began diversifying our practice from a traditional focus on ________, seeking clients who work in adjacent industries, serve market sectors and geographies in which our brand is relatively, or even completely, unknown. To meet this challenge, we need a more ______, ______, and _______ brand identity system.
What We Do (can you summarize your business?)
Our company is unique in_________. We also ________. Here is how we currently describe our services: [insert company boilerplate]
Our Personality (pick five words that summarize your ideal brand personality)
Smart
Frank
Frugal
Fit
Pragmatic
Our Values
 & Mission (summarize your values and mission)
Insert existing company boilerplate
How we fit in (summarize how you are positioned in the market place)
In our industry there are three kinds of service providers, those that are seen as ______, those that are seen as _________, and those that are seen as _________. Relative to these perceptions we are positioned as _________.
A list of companies that do what we do: (list the top ten companies you see as your primary competitors, and peers?)
Interested in learning more about the Marketing 2.0 movement? A group has sprung up that focuses on that very topic … and I am now a badge carrying member. Click on the link below to join me. Let’s change this thing called marketing.
With the inevitable expansion of social networks and the growth of online communities, people are coming up with new ways to group and organize their communities. As we spend more time interacting with communities, we’re also discovering new distinctions within them. In other words, “friends”, “family” and “professional network” are simply not enough anymore.
What I want is a tool that applies fairly simple existing technology to help sort my content streams by relationship groupings that I can set up myself. This would allow me to quickly filter my micro-streams to see just what’s being said by my local friends, my Boston based friends, my marketing industry colleagues, or by my office chums.
It turns out that you can do this for Twitter on your desktop with tools like: Nambu (Mac Only), TweetDeck, and Seesmic. In Facebook, you can create a friend list, and then show updates for that list …. but it’s three or so clicks away from your main stream (thanks to Dan Harrelson for this info). But …. and this is a big BUT ….
It hasn’t hit the mobile environment yet So, I’ve thrown together a quick prototype of the kind of thing I’m looking for based on the Twitterific iPhone App. In this example, I’ve pulled in my groups from the addressbook of the phone but it would make sense for them to sychronize with my desktop tool.
I’m sure something like this is coming along any minute now. What we’re really headed towards is the ability to pull together a quick huddle of a specific group of contacts, so that I can hear just them for a moment while the crowd continues to chatter away. Actually, I really like the name “huddle” somebody should use that.
The Agile MarketerTuning Customer Experience Into Your competitive advantage
"Roland is a student of the game and his book hits on all the right notes.Practical,witty The Agile Marketer should be on your shelf if you aspire to be a modern marketer."-JASCHA KAYKAS WOLFF,CMO at Mozilla
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