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Always keep your target firmly in mind
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I was both flattered and alarmed when Ampcontrol asked me to write its entry for the Institution of Engineers’ 1997 National Engineering Excellence Awards. Ampcontrol as a regional winner had been invited to enter the prestigious national awards and its principals decided they needed professional help to maximise their chances of winning.
My immediate task was to study the highly technical regional entry and decide how to present it for the nationals.
After reading the entry I wondered:
“Am I the right person for this task?
I can’t even understand the terminology.
What am I to do?”
Trying to quiet the panic I thought: “Use your marketing brain. Consider the target audience and what will appeal to them.”
This line of thinking led to three important understandings:
- Firstly, my target audience was the judging panel.
- Secondly, while all the judges were engineers, they came from a wide variety of disciplines so were not necessarily up with the latest electronic talk. In this they had much in common with me!
- Thirdly, to assess the many entries from very diverse fields of engineering, a series of fairly general criteria had been set.
These criteria were:
- The entry’s contribution to the national economy (30 per cent)
- Its impact on quality of life (30 per cent)
- Its significance as a benchmark of Australian engineering (20 per cent)
- The entry’s standing as world’s best practice (20 per cent).
Having established what the judges wanted I set about giving it to them by pitching the award entry solely to what they wanted.
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By then it was clear that the best way to present the wisdom of Ampcontrol was to treat the award entry as a communications task rather than as an engineering project ... The TELLING of the story - ie Its marketing - had become as important as the story itself.
Actually preparing the award entry was executed in three stages;
- Stage 1 was to write each of the judging criteria and sub-criteria on a separate piece of paper.
- Step 2 was to classify the information I had then to cut and paste its component chapters to the appropriate pieces of paper in Stage 1.
Simple inspection and gap analysis then made it obvious where more information was needed to cover the criteria.
It then took a lot of interviews, writing, correcting, rewriting and polishing before adequate detail emerged to support our claim that the Ampcontrol-developed range of technologies deserved to be considered for an award.
In the end we missed out on the big prize but our entry did come second in its category and made the Top 10 of the awards which were presented by Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer at the awards dinner in Canberra.
Testimonial from my client
"...your enthusiasm and commitment in producing quality material for consideration by the judges of the IE Aust. Engineering Excellence Awards and within such a tight time frame, has helped us win through against the odds in this year's National awards. We picked up the AusIndustry Award for Excellence in Research and Development as well as AusIndustry Innovation Award. Our sincere thanks."
Ampcontrol Pty Ltd |
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