Mission Statements vs. Loglines and High Concept
No matter who you are or what you do, you are a salesman. We are all constantly selling whether we are aware of it or not. You had to sell yourself to your ’significant other’ and if you have children you are continuously selling them on how they should behave. At the office, even if you aren’t in sales, you are forever selling your ideas to colleagues or trying to convince staff to get the job done the way you want it done. We are all salesman, all the time.
If you have been in business as long as I have you will have written your share of business plans, mission statements and all. You present your plan to ‘The Man’ and the first thing he or she does is flip to the last page of your beautiful thirty page color laser printed document to look at the projected financial statements. Why ask for a business plan if you’re not going to read it? As far as the ubiquitous Missions Statement is concerned, for most businesses it has become nothing more than a platitude-laden piece of gobbledygook.
Because we live in such a fast paced world, our sales techniques have to be efficient, engaging, and effective. As we stated in “Website Marketing Success – The Art of Storytelling Tip #1″ business executives can learn something from successful screenwriters like Blake Snyder, author of “Save The Cat.”
Snyder talks a lot about ‘loglines’, which are short one or two sentence synopses of movie or television concepts. They appear on the surface to sound a lot like ‘mission statements’ but they may provide a slightly different perspective on what has become an exercise in b-school-jargon mumbo jumbo.
Whether you are developing a new Web-marketing campaign for your company or a complete new website, you could do worse than start with a well-defined logline and title. It will put the entire project into focus, provide a reference so you don’t get sidetracked, and it will provide a great ‘elevator pitch’ when you need to deliver the essence of your business in thirty-seconds. Believe it or not, fifty million dollar movie concepts are sold on the basis of a logline and movie title. They are in short, everything that you need to sell an idea and they are only one or two sentences long.
What’s A Logline?
A website, or marketing campaign logline is your company’s ‘high concept’ idea. It is a one or two line statement that answers specific questions. It should also be accompanied by a project title, and if you really want to get fancy, you can add what the ‘old-timers’ used to call a “One-Sheet” or movie poster style visual, or a video trailer for the campaign.
To find out what your high concept is, answer these questions, and if you can’t, then maybe it’s back to the drawing board:
1. What is your project all about: what’s the purpose?
2. Who is the audience for this presentation?
3. How will your audience be emotionally affected?
4. Have you painted a memorable mental image?
5. Does the project title capture the audience’s attention with an engaging hook?
A good campaign logline will help you maintain focus so your project will be fine-tuned to achieve its purpose. Even if the project does not meet expectations, by keeping on track, you will be able to analysis what went wrong and how to improve the next campaign.
