Developing a Catchphrase
Here’s ours:
At Botonomy, we create solutions that help small teams solve large problems
This catchphrase-based mission approach has three immediate benefits. First, it provides a basis for judging whether or not your various signals and messages to the marketplace are internally-consistent. Everything you say and do should be easily traceable back to this single sentence.
Second, it provides a means to hint at the businesses in which you’re not explicitly engaged or pursuing. For example, we’re not casting ourselves as an “Enterprise” software firm, although there will be clusters of folks in large companies that will immediately “get” what we’re doing with ProjectPipe and find the featureset and integration that we provide uber-useful. We’re also not focusing all our energies on the small-to-medium business segment, although the infrastructure-on-demand aspect of a hosted app is very appealling to those with modest IT budgets.
By explicitly focusing on “helping small teams solve large problems”, we’re defining our core target market as “small teams”, with far less emphasis on the size of their greater organization or specific industry affiliation.
Lastly, keeping it to a single sentence means that you have to leave non-differentiating stuff out. A single sentence doesn’t provide too much room to discuss “customer service”, “shareholder value”, “operational excellence” or the like.