When you put your nose up to the window, be sure your value touches the glass first.
Some time back I led a strategic messaging workshop for ZS Associates based in Chicago. ZS is a global management consulting firm with expertise in go-to-market and sales force strategies. The human resources folks at ZS wanted to improve the strike rate of their recruitment marketing effort. Seems they were spending a lot of money and resources taking the wrong graduate school candidates down the interview trail.
ZS needed to better define and convey their value so both employer and recruit could assess early on whether there was a fit. You see, ZS does a lot of on-campus job recruiting at graduate schools, and on the web. So this is where they needed to employ value filters to convey what they are, and more importantly, what they are not.
So I led a half day workshop with the ZS human resources group to map key ZS features and benefits to emotive keywords. Keywords that could be used in copy points to tell the ZS value story. But first I needed to devise a plan to light their creative fires. So I donned my best Tony Robbins impersonation (albeit toned down) and challenged the HR people to get real about their offer. Why they joined. From this high octane exchange, the emotive keywords sprang forth to write the script itself.
The keywords and phrases from this workshop were captured and grouped in value/attribute relationship sets. In turn, these sets were segmented and tiered into three primary buckets: Emotive. Qualify. Pay off. This tiering then became the framework for a new content architecture: a new immersion experience into both the collateral and digital forms of ZS recruitment marketing.
The real magic in messaging development happens when the value needed to be conveyed is shaped by the emotive power of natural language. An intellectual exercise will never create communication effectiveness.
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