Recognition for Industry Excellence
A Vice President of marketing at a private CPG company, eager to win a prestigious industry award, sought Elicit to design an application package highlighting her achievements and showcasing her professional journey.
Context
Winning a prestigious industry award can accelerate the career of a professional and also bring accolades to a company. When a Vice President of marketing at a private CPG company was at a juncture in her career at which a promotion and professional recognition would make a big difference in achieving her career goals, she tentatively considered putting her name into the running for such an award. The idea of actually executing on this idea, from overcoming what she called her “impostor syndrome” and hesitation to take ownership of her successes in a loud and proud manner to actually preparing a professional package showcasing her candidacy, made her hesitate.
She approached Elicit for professional guidance. What materials would be best to submit and how they should be presented were some of the questions to which she sought answers. The award description needed interpretation and a strategic game plan. Finally, she hoped her application submission would make her stand out from her competitors in the advertising industry. Winning this award would entail print, digital, and social media publicity both for her and for the company she worked for, and she’d have access to exciting individual prizes. It was an opportunity worth pursuing, and which required expert guidance.
Challenge
Dissecting the award application parameters and understanding the ethos of the panel of judges and the spirit of the award, appreciating the constraints and opportunities of the submission guidelines, and creatively ideating the curation of our client’s professional achievements in ways that were both substantial in content as well as attractive in design, were the chief challenges for the Elicit team. Then we had to escort our client in achieving the appropriate sign-offs from her employer, via presentation of the value to the company through her candidacy, and to request approvals from the private company for the appropriate types of data that would be most compelling in highlighting our client’s achievements while maintaining confidentiality of sensitive company data. The final challenge was to sculpt, draft, guide, revise, and craft the actual application components such that our client would arrive at the finish line to submit them with ease and confidence.
The Elicit Process
Research was essential to kick off our process, beginning with understanding the advertising agency holding the competition for the industry award, the spirit behind the award and historical data, and selection process, and the contest instructions. Next, the Elicit team strategically explored the possibilities available for representing our client’s successes. And then we strategically identified what types of components would make a competitive application with clear objectives along with an initial sketch outline for each. We offered our client support in socializing the value to her employer to encourage and participate in the application process by granting her permission to share carefully selected data and to offer her a formal nomination.
Once we had arrived at a strategy and our client had secured buy-in from her executive team, our team engaged in a three-step process to design and develop a competitive, comprehensive application package for our client to submit. First, we developed an overall story arc encompassing our client’s achievements and highlighting her position as a leading marketing professional who has been innovating and shifting paradigms for her CPG company with impressive results worth recognition by the industry.. Second, we produced drafts for three types of media to capture her story: written text, graphical representation, and videography. Third, we engaged with our client on multiple iterations to capture appropriate voice and culture in representation in these media, and to weave in her inputs and the data approved by her employer, in order to finally arrive at complete drafts and/or designs for each, for her company to offer final touches. This generated some excitement among her colleagues, which in itself began to buoy attention on her value at the company.
Solutions
We equipped our client to tell her story through three files: a structured and comprehensive textual statement detailing her merits as a candidate, her value to her company, and the poignancy of her ingenuity to the industry as a whole an aesthetically pleasing visual summary of her professional achievements; and a video communicating the cohesion of her personal and professional journey as a marketing professional. Our team offered multiple iterations of drafts and coaching wherever our client requested our feedback such that by the time the application was ready to submit, our client felt confident that the application package made a strong case for her achievements to be recognized and rewarded.
Impact
What the Elicit team found most rewarding was that our client journeyed to confidence through our process and production of the award application components. We witnessed her comfort with showcasing her successes shift from hesitance to ownership. Further, she reported that the buy-in that had been secured by her company and their feeling of co-creation of her application had already begun to boost her profile within the company, and she was confident that she was earning more respect internally. Finally, she was delighted to have tangible collateral to back up her tremendous value, and she intended to utilize this as a feather in her professional portfolio.