Brand Shorthand

A Position, A Brand ... A Shorthand

• Mark Vandegrift / Lorraine Kessler • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Mark Vandegrift and Lorraine Kessler introduce each other and then jump right into the history about what it took to become famous for positioning strategy. They clear up the confusion by defining a position, a brand, positioning, and branding, and how they are different, but perfectly interrelated. Two sides of the same coin.

If you dig all things marketing, advertising, and positioning, spend 30-ish with Mark and Lorraine.

Mark Vandegrift:

Hello! Welcome to the first episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and my sidekick is Lorraine Kessler, who we more affectionately call Thing One. So that begets the question of who's Thing Two, and that would be me. So by my designation as Number Two, I think you're going to find out that I'm really Lorraine's sidekick, not the other way around. We'll get into details here in a second about how we named this podcast Brand Shorthand, but I wanted to let Lorraine introduce herself a little bit and get a little background on her. I first met Lorraine when she was hired here in 2000 at Innis Maggiore. And I don't think we could say the initial impression was rainbows and unicorns, can we Lorraine?

 

Lorraine Kessler:

No, it was rather, I wouldn't say it was contentious, it's just that we didn't understand each other and where we were coming from particularly. So if our listeners are familiar with that book, that Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, I would say that kind of perfectly described where we were when we started. You were very much down-to-earth practical, tactical, and understood process really well. And of course, me being more of a brand strategist, I was more about feelings and in the clouds in terms of the vision. It may be a simple way to say this: you saw better than anyone what was. And I was always in the world of what could be or can be. And it really took some time to put it together and understand each other. And that's one of the beauties of a collaborative agency is you get that opportunity to come together.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Yeah, definitely. Well, and I think since then, it has been all rainbows and unicorns. We've done a lot of great stuff together. And I think once we figured out that when we arrive at the same conclusion most of the time, we just do so from different angles. And I think everyone else figured it out first, but we do share that passion for positioning. And that's how we became known as Thing One and Thing Two. That probably could have been the other title for this podcast.  I love the story you always tell about your first interview with Dick Maggiore and how you both realized you had a common love for positioning. And that's how you ended up with Innis Maggiore…share a little bit about that story.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Well, sure. After leaving Texas and moving back to Ohio with my husband, I took a job with an ad agency in Toledo, Ohio. And that agency at the time was one of the largest business to business agencies in Ohio. And that made sense because at that time, Toledo had more Fortune 500 companies per square mile, I think, than any other city in the country, believe it or not. But there was Corning, Owens, Illinois, Champion Spark Plug, DeVilbis, some really great brands, and we worked on many of them. And I was handed the book by my then boss, Bill Markin, Positioning by Jack Trout, because up until that point, nothing really made sense to me about what we were doing. It seemed like we were just making stuff, like making ads and making stuff, and without a real sense of purpose, I guess I would say. And then when I read the book by Jack Trout, I was just totally bowled over with how it was the key. And then Bill Markin had a relationship with Jack Trout, and so the firm had one with him, and that was a great beginning. And then lo and behold, my husband's transferred to the northeast side of the state, and I interview with Dick Maggiore and find out that he is just uber-Trout in everything and in positioning and our conversation was all about positioning and of course in Dick's innumerable way he started challenging me on some positions and what they were and how well I think about different companies in Northeast, Ohio. And it was a really great conversation because it's like two minds meet in this wonderful area of Canton, Ohio and who would have ever thunk that we would share the same kind of basic belief. I think it's because it holds up. It just holds.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Yeah. Well, ironically, I think because of Dick's love for Jack Trout, he always talks about going out and buying that book and it was just a random purchase. But because of that, Innis Maggiore really stood for positioning for a good 40 of its 50 years. And I think what happened though is you helped bring it to the fore as we claim positioning as our position. But there was that one quote from Jack Trout and it was probably around the time we brought Jack to Canton for a big event, what was that 2008, I think, and we knew we had arrived because his quote was, “these guys really get it more than any other agency.” And, you know, when we developed that claim as the nation's leading positioning ad agency, it just didn't happen overnight. It was a process of developing tools and having a discipline and really aligning the whole organization around that. Why don't you share a little bit about it because you had the most impact in terms of the tangible tools and discipline that we developed around it.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Sure. While Dick was steeped in positioning, I wouldn't say that agency necessarily was. And so when we claim something as bold as that, even with Jack's endorsement, and we have the opportunity to work with Jack on Microsoft's MSN, positioning that as the advanced internet, and we work with Jack on Uniroyal who wanted to research that brand, and we met with him in Florida. So we've had real personal engagement with Jack in addition to the event that you talked about. But what really became clear to me is when you're trying to, and this is really instructive for any of the clients out there or people out there who have a service versus making a tangible product that they need to position. When you're trying to position a service... such as an ad agency or law firm or financial planner, you lack tangibility. You need to have tangibility. You need to construct a tangibility around the surface. Otherwise, it's what I would call too squishy for people to understand the difference. So we could say all we want what positioning is, but as you know, there's many different definitions for that. So that's kind of a problem. We're kind of educating us as a slow boat to brand fame. Unfortunately, we were in that mode. We did have Jack Trout in the work, but still there's confusion. So we needed something tangible to say that we really know this better than anybody else. And that meant that we had to create a process, a process by which we helped clients determine their position. Now, one thing I'll say, having worked with Jack and I love him dearly, he's an East coaster lay-in, right? And he's very abrupt and he's very fast. And Jack Trout could walk into a room and walk into Microsoft or walk into a big company and say, here's your position and that's it, it's obvious. And everybody would go, okay, okay, okay. They bow down because he's Jack Trout. So he's the tangible. We didn't have that without Jack. So we don't have that ability. What we needed to do is construct a process that allowed the client to construct the position. while we guided them through very key filters that need to be met to determine whether a position is strong or weak. And there are very objective filters that we developed and put into a process called the Appreciative Discovery® where we work with top leaders. And I want to make the point that you cannot do this without the CEO. You cannot do this without top leadership.

 

A position isn't something that can be relegated just to the marketing team. or anyone else. It has to be the operational, the organization's operational idea. It has to be supported through the whole organization. And so we created a very tangible process. You give it a name, that's one thing. You tell what it involves, that's another. And then you methodically and with consistency walk clients through that process, educate them on it, and you continue to come back to it again and again.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Well, you definitely developed an extensive list of tools. Out of that, what do you think has been the most impactful of those tools? So when we go take clients through the Appreciative Discovery®, what do you think their big aha moment is? I always thought, I think you called it the tagline test or something like that. There's this little light bulb that goes on with clients when we're in the Appreciative Discovery® and they go, oh, okay, that's what it is. Can you identify one or two?

 

Lorraine Kessler:

You've been through these, so sometimes that light bulb goes on at different times. But for me, you know, there are four filters, right? It's the customer filter. How does this idea inform a very distinctive audience? That's not the same as saying, it's an idea that everybody wants, right?

 

It's a distinctive audience, like Choosey Mothers, Choose Jif. Or... Apple for the creator makers, right? It's a very distinctive audience, very different than someone who just wants a computer for less, etc. So how well does the idea resonate with your target audience? The people you really feel you can cultivate or have already cultivated that you want to expand. And that usually is found its way in psychology. 

 

The other is context. Is this idea right for the time? Is it too early, too late? What's going on in the larger sphere? And if you look, a lot of times the SWOT will kind of cover this in terms of threats and opportunities, right? What are the threats and opportunities? 

 

The other C is company and I found that with nonprofits, the company filter, which is more about purpose, purposeful mission, the felt feeling of the organization, that filter bubbles up a little bit more strongly than some of the others. 

 

But for me and for most let's call commercial brands, the most important filters, competitive, the competition. Who is the competition? What ideas do they own in the mind? I mean, we have to understand that a brand is simply an idea you own in the mind. And if a competitor owns an idea in the mind, a position in the mind, good luck you trying to say me too.

 

That is one of the biggest mistakes. You have to find another idea. And so really plotting where competition is. And then I think where the light goes on to your thing is when they see the contrast that can be drawn between the proposition you're creating for the client and where competitors are. So if you are Porsche, that's a sports car versus an Impala family car. The more contrast, right, that you can create with your idea to find, and I think in all positioning. It's about finding a niche that has a large enough TCM, total customer market, to make you successful. And if you're an entrepreneur, that niche can be small and be very profitable. If you're bigger, then you need a bigger total customer market. But when they see that contrast, when they see how the story gets told. that drives choice. Oh, I want the fastest car. I want sex appeal in my automobile. I don't just want to look like I made it economically. I want to look sexy or younger or whatever. When you draw that contrast, that's where usually the light goes on.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Yeah, sure does. Well, a lot of people that are listening probably know about positioning already. They know that Innis Maggiore is America's number one positioning ad agency. But I think what I'd like to do, because you just brought it up about a brand as an idea in the mind, I'd like to go back to the fundamentals for just a few minutes, because as we've seen, we have people come in, they throw around branding, positioning, brand, position. brand positioning, they don't even necessarily know the difference between marketing, advertising and PR. 

 

Let's put up a slide here that will show for our listening audience only, that'll be a little bit difficult, but just from top to bottom, what you're going to see is what we define as a position, what positioning is as an action, what a brand is, and then what branding is as an action. Believe it or not, these all have different meanings, but they're used interchangeably. And that's fine because at the end of the day, if we have a good proper understanding of what we're headed for, the terms don't matter as much. 

 

But I think we have some new listeners on here that would probably appreciate how we break down those terms. So Lorraine, why don't you work through these as we have them defined and just give, I guess, your perspective. on how it might be easier for everyone to understand the difference between a position and the act of positioning as one side of the coin and a brand and branding as the other side of the coin because it's all one big thing and we've talked about that, you know, six gazillion times. But let's go through that. So let's first talk about what is a position.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Well, a position first and foremost is a strategy, right? It is a strategy around which you build your branding. To put it simply, to go where you were saying, all of branding is, there are two different sides of the same coin. One is the position. What is the idea I want to get in the mind and make that idea synonymous with my brand so that if I say, if I say Volva, Right? The audience says safety or safe cars. And if I say who is known for safe cars, people say Volvo. So, as you said, the branding is the action. Here's a real simple way for, I think, our audience to think about it. It involves first getting the right idea. That's the position. That's the strategy. So what is the right idea? Well, as I said, those four filters help us objectively decide how strong or weak an idea is that a company can embrace. But what it really is, is your, it's an idea that is both highly relevant and unique to your target audience. The audience, this is the distinctive audience as I said before you're going after. So highly relevant is meaningful and highly unique is differentiated. So you're looking for an idea that really I like to call has the strong R and D, right? Relevance and differentiation. And it really fits you as a company and fits the times. So those, the R&D kind of to me drive the other Cs.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

To interrupt you here real quick, so that our audience understands, you can have that position without ever being in the marketplace. In fact, when you say that most businesses go into business or most entrepreneurs go into business because they have this idea that they can do something better than someone else, you know, what's available in the market, or they can do it differently is probably the better way to say that. as you've said, the R&D. So this idea can exist, but it doesn't mean we have a brand yet. So talk about that a little bit.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Right. I mean, an idea that is just an idea that's not, I mean, the object of advertising and therefore branding, right, is to make your brand famous. That's the number one goal. We know that if it's famous for something meaningfully differentiated, it has higher value. So, you know, to go back to your point is branding is getting your idea and your brand synonymous and making it famous. And that is the end goal. Now, you can have a brand that's famous and has a poor or weak position, and you're still gonna have some success, right? Because fame is its own virtue, right?

 

And there are people famous for just being famous, like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. They really haven't done anything. They're just famous for being famous. But ultimately, for most brands, because they're in such hyper competitive markets and choice and you have to have customers make a choice and you want to help them. It's a benefit to have them choose what best fits what they're after. It's a benefit to have the right position, a strong position, make that glued to your brand identity and make that famous together. So the two are taking in. So it's get the right idea, the position strategy is upstream and then get the idea right. is how you brand it. That's the action you were talking about. 

 

Branding is how, and branding involves how you dramatize the idea in terms of taglines and slogans and phrases and even personalities or the personality of the brand. It's even the media you choose is part of the branding. It's the design, the logo, the image you create. That's all part of the branding action, if you will. But around that... around that exterior core of all those things I just mentioned, in the center is the silver bullet of the position, the idea. And so that's what we try to do is put this, and that's why an agency such as us that is dedicated to this are so much better in helping customers or clients come up to their deciding their position than say a McKinsey or anybody else. 

I have read, sadly, some of their positioning ideas and their paragraphs. It has to be a simple idea, right? We're the safe auto.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Yes. Well, I always use the Super Bowl as an example, because people ask, “Oh, what's a position? What was this positioning stuff you do?” And, you know, we have to your point about you can make a brand without having a highly differentiated or relevant idea. But when you walk away from the advertisement, you sometimes can't even remember what category it was in. Was it a beer commercial? Or was it a car commercial? And so it feels like our industry is doing a lot more where they're going for some kind of movie award and creating entertainment instead of doing good advertising where it's trying to get into that gray matter with the idea. And that's my test for people. I say, that commercial you mentioned you liked five minutes ago, who was it for?

 

And they can't remember. “And what was it for?” They don't even remember the category. So I think that’s critical.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

It’s the worst form of patronage in the world for a client to pay money to an agency to do an ad that only makes the agency famous, like Bogoski did for Burger King, for example, with the, what was that chicken thing they did? I can't remember, it was the, some dancing chicken and it got all these awards, but what did it have to do with Burger King? You know, not very much. It did a lot for the agency. It did very little for the client. So that's the worst form of patronage in the world.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Well, one of the things on the slide that our listeners and viewers will notice is that for a brand and the process of branding, what we're trying to do is create that shorthand. So going back to the name of our podcast, Brand Shorthand, it really is a good word for it because when you get down to it, we want the words, the pictures, the sounds, of a brand, your brand, if you're a client, to create a shorthand to the differentiated idea. And that shorthand to that differentiated idea means a shorthand to the position. So for instance, Lorraine, let's do a little exercise here. If I say Google, you say...

 

Lorraine Kessler:

search engine.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

And if I say, Sensodyne, you say...

 

Lorraine Kessler:

toothpaste for people my age. Right? Yeah, people who have sensitive teeth. Great name, by the way.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Yeah, or conversely, if I say like the original cola, you say.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Coca-Cola.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Or if I say the hip cola.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

That's Pepsi, new generation. Go against the old, the traditional, with the new. So that's a really key point. You know, sometimes people will accuse us of using these examples and then you say it doesn't relate to their business or it's old or outdated. And I would encourage the listeners to pay attention to the principles, right? The principles of positioning really matter. Coca-Cola being the old storied established cola, the first to mind. That is the goal. Any brand, if you had it, you wanna be first to mind in the category, and Coca-Cola was, because you're gonna have twice the market share of number two, and that has been historically proven now. So Coca-Cola was first to the category. Well, they're the traditional, the original, the old. So what's the pejorative of that? Well, you're the old thing, right? And people... want both tradition, they want reliability, but they also want new. So Pepsi for years did the Pepsi challenge, the taste test, and they won in a blind taste test. But what they didn't realize is people taste images. They don't, when they go to buy, they're not doing, they're not thinking of the taste test. They're buying, they're tasting images. So it didn't do much to change market share between Coke and Pepsi to do that taste test. What worked was when Pepsi number two... did the only thing it could do, and it attacked number one by going east to their west. If you're the old thing, pejorative, this is the contrast I was talking about, that becomes exciting for clients. If you're the old thing, then we'll be the new thing, and we're for a new generation. So we have a different psychology. And I will say that one of the things I think a lot of times agencies and clients miss in media is psychology of the customer is more important than the demographics.

 

Go for the psychology when you just find a distinctive audience and then let the demos bubble up and then you can analyze that data and learn a little bit. But the key is to hit a psychology. So if you're one of the old fuddy-duddies who want the old Coca-Cola, keep drinking on and if you're one of the new hipsters, I don't care if you're 80, 60, 50, 30, 20, 18, you'll want Pepsi. and that worked perfectly. The lesson is number two should always go east to the west of number one.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

And you know, in the Appreciative Discovery®, we always have a write board up. And I always like how you make it so simple where you have the brand name and then an equal sign. And you always say, we're just trying to define your is what is your is. And you always make the joke about “with apologies to Bill Clinton.” What is “is,” but you know, share a little bit about that and why we think that is exactly what we're talking about when we say this is your brand shorthand.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Right, and so your brand, let's say your name, equals an idea, right? So think of, if you're listening, take your company name, or if you have a product brand or whatever, and put it on the left, and then put an equal sign, and then put, what does that brand mean to my customers? That's relevant and important, and differentiating. If you don't know, then we gotta find it. If you do know, great, now you know what your marketing should be about. and delivering.

 

That's the baby your branding needs to deliver. If it delivers a bunch of other messages, it's missing the mark. So it's what I said earlier, it's the equivalence. Our job is to make that brand name equal that idea so that if someone is shared the name Apple, they know what it stands for. And if they're shared the idea of Apple as thinking differently about computers for creative makers, and they associate that with Apple, we've won. And what you don't want is an is where if you showed it to 100 different people, they all had a different is for that brand. It goes back to an old movie called City Slickers. It's one thing, right? Remember, it's one thing.

 

So right, you're either gonna be low price, you're gonna be the fastest. You're going to be the slowest, you're going to be the thickest, you're going to be whatever that is is. And if you can get it down to one word, that's brilliance. If you're going to be the commodity product and sell at the lowest price possible, then you better be able to always beat the next competitor who can go lower. So that is a way to position. It's just not the highest value way to position. And not many companies can do that. So you've got to find something else.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Well, I think when you and I talk a lot of times about the psychology of this, and you mentioned owning that psychology, we find this works in our own lives. I remember the day when someone asked me, and this was probably in the last 10 years, who the class clown was in my grade, and it was so easy to bring up that name because it was like, well, I haven't even said that name in 30 years.dating myself, but I hadn't said that name in 30 years, but because I had in my brain who our class clown was, that name came back and I won't bring up his name for purposes of privacy, but it made me realize that in part, we classify our relationships like this, with simple concepts, just like the idea of brands having a position. So if I say “best friend,” you can probably come up with a name, if I say “computer geek,” you can probably come up with a name and these are all relative to our own lives. If I say “your first love,” I mean, goodness gracious, I think most people can come up with a name. “The smartest person I know,” you know, name that. So for most people, if you list these labels, all these names start coming to mind. And our mind must work in that simple way, or we have a defense mechanism that the brain kicks into gear so that any clutter we're seeing is just blocked. That way our minds don't explode. And I think that's why we're committed to positioning strategy is because we see that is the basic way that our brains work. So if it works that way in personal relationships, it would work that way in, in brand relationships.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

And I think to what you're saying is we must remember that a position, it's always about a brand position, right? And I said a position is a strategy and it's upstream from the action of branding. But the end game of the branding endeavor, once it has that idea and it's now getting that idea right in the market, is to get to a brand shorthand for the customer. Customers don't think as deeply as we do about this. They just don't. So this is where the artistry has to come into play to get that idea down to a synthesized, memorable idea that the customer will react to. And that's the artistry. That's kind of the magical part of it, where an agency's talent really has to be put on the court of play. And that's the end goal, right? And that's why I like what you named this, Brand Shorthand, because we can talk here all day long and read theoretical things about positioning and what it is and what it isn't, how to get it and all that. But when we're done figuring that out with a client and they've embraced an idea, the job of the creative is to get that to the simplest possible way of getting it across. And then... sticking with it, it requires both consistency and constancy. Consistency is you say the same thing or you look the same. That's where your brand identifiers come into play, the logo, the colors. You don't have to have uniformity, you need to have unity. I mean, you don't have to be like a police cop, but there needs to be unity. But that consistency and constancy is you're in the market all the time. 

 

You're in there in front of your audience. So they're two different things. And that's part of the branding skill and discipline as well.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Well, I would say that's probably enough for our first episode. I thought it'd be good to give our listeners some background of us and our love for positioning. And that's really what we'll talk about each week. Do you have any closing thoughts, Lorraine?

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Yeah, I always like to say this little drawing behind me, the scribble drawing, which by the way I did. I like to say to clients, this is your business. This is what it feels like. It may even look like this before you get your position. And when you get your position, you're gonna have a coherent picture of what your brand is all about, and so are your customers.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

That's a great illustration, literally. So thanks Lorraine. Join us for our next episode of Brand Shorthand as we discuss some recent successes and maybe one failure of brands we all know and love … or sometimes love. And we'll see you on the next episode of Brand Shorthand.