Explain Yourself

Don’t fall for Field of Dreams marketing. Develop your elevator speech.

Remember “Field of Dreams?” The famous movie where Kevin Costner builds a baseball field in his backyard so that his late father and other great baseball players would appear and play ball together? The recurring line in the movie was "Build it, and he will come."

Field of Dreams or “Build it, and they will come” marketing seems to be an approach too many companies take these days. It's tempting to think that if you build a good company—good quality, good people, good pricing, etc.—that the customers will come.

No matter how good your people or product are, if customers can't succinctly understand what you do and aren't excited about it, they will not come.

In the previous post, the focus was on Field of Dreams marketing—where you build a nice company with nice products and people and expect customers to flock to it, only to be disappointed.

Here's a way to tell if you're engaged in a Field of Dreams marketing approach. Are you surprised that a competitor of yours has mediocre or poor product yet does very well? Or that your customers don't understand how great your product is?

In our sound-bite world, customers will give you only a few moments to differentiate your organization from the competition. The simplest answer is to develop your elevator speech so that any customer or prospect can quickly understand just how great you are.

If you can simply articulate what makes your company unique, that's a start. That message needs to be repeated and reinforced in every form of communication you produce at every level, from internal marketing to your sales channel and on into your external advertising and marketing.

After all, if you can't articulate what makes you special, how can you expect customers or clients to know?

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