Elevator speeches, About Us pages, press release boilerplate and LinkedIn profiles are your chance to describe what you do in one sentence. Can you pull that off?

Quick – What does your company do?

Did it take you more than one sentence to answer that question? It probably did. Now suppose you were an entrepreneur pitching your company. Could you do it in one sentence?

Brevity is the soul of marketing

Maybe not the soul of marketing, but surely the esophagus: If the copy is too big or too noxious, Marketing should kick it back out.

Anthony Ha posted a few weeks back on the winners of the One-Sentence Pitch Competition that TechCrunch hosted for the Founder Institute.They recommended this format:

“My company, _(insert name of company)_, is developing _(a defined offering)_ to help _(a defined audience)_ _(solve a problem)_ with _(secret sauce)_”

From 450 entries, the Institute selected a handful of winners. Every one of them embodies the enviable spirit of “Faß Dich kurz!” the motto with which the German telephone company used to exhort customers to keep their conversations as brief as possible.

Does your press release boilerplate describe your company as succinctly as this?

“My company, Airto, is developing a web-based social seating check-in platform to help air travelers see who is on board their flight and use Facebook and Linked in to assign all flight seats with one click.”

Not much ambiguity or fluff, hemming or hawing in that one, is there? Or this one:

“My company, GradeZone Points, is developing an online and mobile platform to help socially-conscious businesses reward high school students for good grades and good attendance with deals and local programs that inspire a community-wide concern for education.”

Easy to see what’s in it for businesses, what’s in it for students and what’s in it for the community.

Do you ever try to make your marketing communications that succinct? What comes of it?

photo credit: futureshape