When you take your two to four themes together, and add the stock topics of leadership and success, the key aspects of your past and the interesting things you want to do with your future, you’ll get your message. Your message is that sentence or three that sums up who you are, what you stand for, what you want to do and why you need to go to business school to do it. It is your application ‘take-away’: the absolute core of what you want the admissions officer to know; what you want to be impressed on her brain after she has closed your file; what you want her to remember about you a month later when all the details of your story are long forgotten; and what will come to mind when she sees you in the school’s hallway on your way to class a year later.
In the Mexican example above, your message might be: ‘Business school will build on my diplomatic background, giving me the training and contacts to build a large-scale Web-based initiative involving children from the US, Mexico and Canada. It will give me the credibility and skills to fundraise, develop and lead this dream project.’
Applying marketing principles
If you recognize the construction of a clear, themed, goal-oriented message targeted to the needs and interests of a particular audience as classic marketing – you are right. As explained in Chapter 1, that is exactly what you are doing.
You are positioning yourself as attractively as possible in the eyes of your consumer, fitting with their needs while differentiating yourself from your competition; and finding the clearest and most compelling way to express this differentiated value.
Note that excluding extraneous data is also a crucial marketing technique.
When General Motors launches a car, they could tell you a hundred things about it, but they don’t. They may create a marketing message for ‘Car A’ using the interweaving themes of safety, comfort and style. ‘Car B’ might be positioned POSITIONING, MESSAGING AND MAPPING 75
as a youthful, active, performance car. ‘Car C’ may be framed with the themes of enviro-friendliness, good fuel consumption and advanced engineering. In each case, marketing professionals are choosing and expressing themes to organize the transfer of a clear, swift message that will resonate with a chosen target segment. Everything else is excluded from the communication.
In the case of MBA admissions, your target segment is known and fixed.
With small exceptions, admissions officers need and want to see the same things in candidates (as defined in the attributes section in Chapter 2). Know- ing who they are and what they are looking for, your job is to find the parts of your profile that correlate with these requirements and preferences. You then need to construct a themed message that expresses your differentiated and superior value in these desirable areas – just like marketing anywhere. You will repeat your message in various different and subtle ways throughout your essays, and indeed throughout the whole application ‘campaign’, from the essays to the references to the interviews. Repetition clarifies and reinforces your message.
The alternative communications metaphor, as mentioned above, is think- ing of yourself as the politician campaigning for election: you simplify your candidacy by creating themes (causes) that interweave to become an overall message (a platform). You research the needs of your ‘electorate’, devising a position closer to those needs than your competing politicians do, and therein become electable because of differentiated and superior value. You repeat your message at every opportunity, judiciously adapting it to different circum- stances. When answering questions, you credibly tackle the question – but, in fact, you always find a way to insert your campaign platform message.
Message techniques Staying on message
Among both sales staff and politicians on the campaign trail, you will often hear handlers repeat the communications mantra: ‘stay on message!’ This means, don’t stray from the topic you want the target audience to know about, and how you have decided to tell them about it. Avoid blurring your message with extraneous information. Don’t develop other, potentially confusing points that might be challengeable or at odds with your basic position or the position of your product.
In the same way, in the essays and in your file as a whole, your task is to define your message and then stick to it. You can delve widely into your past and your future, your successes, interests, values and beliefs, but all the things you say have finally to be woven tightly into one clear message, and that message is the only thing you should really concern yourself with. If it is not
‘on message’, don’t say it.
76 PROFILE-BUILDING TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES
The elevator speech
One way to focus and simplify your message is to do the following exercise.
Imagine you get into an elevator at the ground floor with the head of admis- sions from your dream school. You recognize her from the glossy brochure in the lobby. She’s already pressed the button for the eighteenth floor. You now have about forty-five seconds to introduce yourself and to say the most important things about you, including why you are applying, and to leave a memorable, lasting impression so that as she leaves she says: ‘That’s very inter- esting – what’s your name again? I’ll certainly look out for your application.’
These forty-five seconds are your ‘elevator speech’. Your message will be about three to six sentences long. It will serve you to have written it out and learned it by heart so that every time you need to explain briefly and clearly who you are and why you are applying, you will be able to do it faultlessly.
Write it down, print it out, have it pinned to the notice board above your desk.
Say it to yourself before you begin work on your essays. If you are going for an interview, practise it until you can say it in your sleep.
Labelling
When people are dealing with message statements all the time, even a short message can be unwieldy. It will commonly be contracted to no more than a label. The label may not even be particularly appropriate or accurate, but will nevertheless be the quick handle that everyone refers to.
For example, if members of the admissions committee were referring among themselves to the Mexican applicant described above, they might refer loosely to ‘the Mexican diplomat’ or ‘the Mexican child project guy’. These labels are not carefully thought out. They just express, in a busy admissions office, what appears at a casual glance to be the most distinctive profile markers that define a candidate. The next file that comes up could be ‘the ABN-Amro fixed-equity guy’, ‘the Bridge-player’ or ‘Hans, the Swedish dog-breeder’.
Your label is important because it makes a difference if you become labelled with something interesting and valuable-sounding that can have a positive influence on undecided members of the committee, or something generic or flippant-sounding that could harm your chances. You can’t decide your label, but you can influence what it is and make it more likely that it works in your favour. That is, you can work to make sure that your label is in fact an accurate contraction of your differentiated, valuable position. The more you define it yourself, the safer you are. You positively affect your labelling by being crystal clear above what your themes are, and what your message is, and how it all fits together – so that it is less likely that Adcom will light on a mistaken or contin- gent label. The accuracy and differentiating quality of the label you acquire in the admissions office is a reflection of how successful you have been in communicating your message.
Another, bolder technique is to develop a label for yourself that you POSITIONING, MESSAGING AND MAPPING 77
like – and slip it into one or more of your essays. You could refer to yourself as
‘the Texan Quant’ or ‘the Melody Maker’, and so on. You want something that adds value and is highly sticky – in other words, memorable to the point of being unforgettable.