February 16, 2012

Can an elevator pitch do justice to a brand?

‘Brand stories’ is a phrase that came into marketing vocabulary about 10 years ago as a way to illustrate through a story what a brand stood for.

I was reading some old stuff (about 40 years old) a few weeks ago that referred to how, by limiting the words used to describe a brand, we limit the capacity of people to fully understand the brand. The article articulated how you could use print material to introduce customers to the brand features and benefits but that, the then new channel of colour television, enabled you to sell the full emotional impact of the brand.

How things have changed – we now spend hours developing what has become known as the ‘elevator pitch’ which is the capacity to describe the brand in the time it takes to go from one floor to the next in an elevator. This begs the question – ‘Can a vibrant, consumer engaging brand be captured in a single sentence?’

Many would recall that in the late 1990’s the Yellow Pages ‘Goggomobil’ television commercial – a brand story told in a very powerful and entertaining way, or the ‘Not Happy Jan’  commercial for the same brand a couple of years later. You will also recall the days that you went to the movies and saw some powerfully produced brand stories as 2 minute commercial that were memorable, even when shown adjacent to the movie.

Is it time to bring back this type of brand story?

Some would argue that with YouTube we have access to engaging video content on demand and that, as a result, it is difficult to compete. Others argue that in an era in which we are time poor we do not want to take time out to be interrupted by brand stories – we want them in a sentence, on Facebook, on Twitter and everywhere else.

I read a Blog last week by Seth Godin in which he referred to the different take out of the simple phrase, ‘I went to the football’. To one this was, as he put it, a religious experience, full of emotion and passion. To another it was simply going to see his nephew play a game. If we limit the expression of our brand story to an ambiguous phrase or line, I think we limit the capacity of customers to understand the brand and all it stand for.

If we seek to lock our brand into a sentence, it had better be a good one!