What do you do? The Importance of Having an Elevator Speech
You have to go to Elevator Speech.com and check out the short video of 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon interviewing a guy named Jeff Dachis, who then owned an e-business consultancy called Razorfish. Bob Simon asks a simply question, “What does your company do?” Even after repeating the question three times, Mr. Dachis still can’t provide Bob with a clear answer to the question. It’s embarrassing. And, it pretty effectively highlights how difficult it can sometimes be to describe your organization.
For colleges, I think a slightly different question is more appropriate for a marketing context. “What makes your college different and better than others your prospects commonly consider?” Imagine videotaping all members of a college’s cabinet providing a 30-second answer to this question. How similar or different would they be? How true would they be? If you changed the name of the school, could the answers still apply? I think this would be a great exercise. I’m going to try to talk one of my clients into letting me do it. Will write back about the results.