Positioning for Professionals - Exploding Myths Part 1

Do you have a stale brand? Are McDonalds' and Starbucks' problems related to positioning? Mark and Lorraine dive in on this topic before they get to Positioning for Professionals, a book by Tim Williams that discusses how positioning works for professional service firms. The positioning duo walks through the myths about positioning that many service firms claim keep them from differentiating themselves. This episode covers the first four myths: 1) The better company, product, or service wins; 2) My business is a commodity; 3) Competition leads to commoditization; and 4) "We're not a brand." See how Mark and Lorraine explode these myths with clear thinking, a few short rib and ape references, and some recommendations on how the professional service industry can apply the principles of positioning.

Spend 30ish with Mark and Lorraine as they talk all things marketing, advertising, and positioning.

Transcript

Mark Vandegrift
Welcome to the latest episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me is she who puts the P in positioning, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, how are you doing today?

Lorraine Kessler
Mark, you never cease to amaze me with these introductions. I'm doing great. I'm doing great.

Mark Vandegrift
Good, good. I am fighting allergy season. So if I sound a little verklempt today, I am. But yes, it does.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, yeah, well, it happens, although mine, mine have been less, you know, it's weird to say, say they come and go, but a lot of the allergies I used to have, I don't have now.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, good. Excellent. Well, do you have any rants today? I think our listeners would be disappointed if we didn't pull something out of our hat.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I just think… it's not so much a rant, it's an observation perhaps that some of the big brands that you and I grew up with, I more than you grew up with McDonald's, right? That was my first job, in fact, was I worked at McDonald's. And Starbucks, which I think you did grow up with more than I did, and both those brands, I think, are, seeing some difficult times and responding in different ways. 

I just wonder if the ways that they're responding are sufficient totally to where they are in their trajectory. ‘Cause you and I have talked, I think that every brand has a life, a lifespan and, and what can happen just like stars in our universe as they start to die, right? And how do you reclaim that fire and that fascination when your brand becomes so established over time that it becomes somewhat stale or less… let's say less bright. And you know, McDonald's is responding by responding to the price of their product, which has been insane, right? I mean, it really has. Right.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, $20 happy meals.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, I mean, I think my daughter said she it cost her $60 to feed her family at McDonald's which that's unbelievable. But I think McDonald's has more of a problem than pricing their food quality. I know because the restaurant I worked in in New Jersey Was a test kitchen. So we launched the Quarter Pounder. We were one of the restaurants we launched Egg McMuffin we launched pancakes.

And I got a quarter pounder maybe, it was the first one I had in many, many years, but I got one maybe a few months ago before I started doing my keto or low carb cycle. And it was the worst-tasting… I don't even know what it was. It had no resemblance to what the Quarter Pounder distinctively was. So to me, if they just lower price and the food quality goes away.

And is that discernibly different? I'm not sure that's going to be a total fix. Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. Well, we know Starbucks, we talked about that last time putting in drive-throughs, which absolutely takes away from the coffee experience that they developed. It's like they're going backwards to what they started out having as a brilliant way to break into what would otherwise be a commodity market, which was coffee.

Lorraine Kessler
Right. Yeah, and they're focusing now on faster service because people have complained about how long it takes to get a very common cup of coffee or cappuccino, something that's not that hard. And so they're responding by speeding up the line, which really is again about that drive through it. And I just wonder, you know, what does that do to the aura? There's this such a fragile thing called the mystique of a brand. And convenience is rarely a fix for that, rarely.

Mark Vandegrift
Yep. Yep. Well, good. I think we have a fun topic for our listeners these next couple episodes. And just for a change of pace, I'm going to let you introduce our topic today, Lorraine.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, thanks, Mark. Well, you know, having been a positionist for most of my career, which goes on now for decades, one of the things, as you know, that I would do is create notes from books, attend different seminars. I had the pleasure, at the invitation of our CEO, Dick Maggiore, to attend a seminar led by Tim Williams, who wrote the book, Positioning for Professionals. 

And while what's in his book isn't particularly new, it's just that he has a different perspective on how to talk about positioning, particularly to those industries such as ours and any kind of financial planning or medical. That's a service oriented business. And so he puts it within that kind of lens and he did a really nice job and it's a very good book. So if anybody can grab that book…

I would do notes and then I would share these notes with our account team and anyone else who wanted to learn more about positioning, because I feel like that's the ongoing dedication you have to have to the principles that underline what we think about and why we think they're so important. 

So anyway, that said, I took his book and when I translated it, I called them exploding myths, myths that people/clients would typically come into us as seeking outside agency help would come kind of I think already in their cabanza and we'd have to we'd have to dispel or you know set aside so that they could see a new how important differentiation is as the prime idea. It's not that these other things are necessarily bad it's just that they're not and they shouldn't be given as much emphasis as differentiation. And I always think it's about emphasis, right? So, yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, absolutely good. Well, we have quite a few of these that we're going to be throwing onto the screen and Lorraine, you take the odd ones this time and I'll take the even ones. So go ahead and introduce the first myth. We'll call these myths and then we'll explode them.

Lorraine Kessler
Okay, the myth one is that the better company, the better product, the better service wins. Okay. And it kind of relates to what we were just talking about with what McDonald's and what I think Starbucks are doing. Now, this is not to say that companies shouldn't try to be better and adopt best practices and take what is known to perfect their service, the delivery of it, the convenience of it, whatever. But it's to say again, it's not as important… or it's not in terms of the perception you're trying to create and positioning is a battle for the mind. It's not as important as having a unique difference that sets you apart, right? And the problem is that everybody thinks I want to be better. So they think if it's faster, if it's cheaper, if it's this, or it matches their competition, which we're going to get into, I think, in one of these myths.

That somehow that's where the Holy Grail is and we're here to say the Holy Grail is in differentiation. And one of the foundational elements of this myth too is that and I just heard an ad I can't remember who it was for the other day that “we have better people” and I mean every time I hear that I like what pool are they hiring from? Right? The only way you're having better people is there is no way because you can pay a lot more and you might not get better more motivated associates or employees You might just get more entitled people who care more about money than doing a great job. So You know, that's just one of the big fallacies and so that's kind of what these myths try to expose. So that's number one. That's number one.

Mark Vandegrift
Good. Yeah. Well, myth number two is: my business is a commodity. And I always like to, when I introduce positioning to classrooms, and I've done this recently at a couple of colleges, I always like to say, if you can differentiate the toothpaste aisle, you can differentiate anything. 

And, you know, our definition of a brand is that, consumers are willing to pay more money for an idea that has value, above another product in which they have an assigned value to it, okay? In fact, I believe it's Michael Porter that says there's only two ways to differentiate. Am I getting the right person there? You're either differentiating on price, or you're differentiating on value.

And by values, talking about providing meaning to the brand, something beyond just price. So a feature like going to the toothpaste aisle, it's toothpaste for sensitive teeth or whitening or something that goes beyond just dollars and cents.

Lorraine Kessler
or even being a leader where there's built-in credibility, right?

Mark Vandegrift
Right. So, you know, the problem is, is there's no really, as he says in his book, there's no such thing as a commodity. He uses the example of airlines where they think there's some kind of a special case and that other categories are much easier to brand. 

I would say an airline is able to provide a lot more value than toothpaste? And they point to places like Starbucks. But as we just said, Starbucks came out of what? Coffee. We could all get back in the day, I know I'm dating myself here, but we could get a cup of coffee for a quarter and maybe going further back, a dime or a nickel. So what did they come out of? They came out of what we would typically classify as completely a commodity. 

And when there were no strong coffee brands, that's when Starbucks developed. So I always look at this too. I always say, you know, water, why in the world would we pay more dollars and cents for something like this when we can go get it for fractions of a penny out of a tap? And yet this is a $6 billion a year industry. And that's just regular water. If you add in sparkling water and flavored water and all those other things, you're talking about paying much more for something that in the past was the ultimate commodity. So it just is hard to fathom that someone would pay up to 1000 times the cost of tap water just to buy it in a bottle.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, and I'll give kudos to, it wasn't us who did this, I wish we did, but it's the right position. There was a law firm in our market called Tsangos, Plackas, and Manos. You're familiar with them, right? It's just Plackas now. But their position became the law lions. And what do you think of as a lion? The attributes, right? Ferocious and big and can eat prey.

They are fierce litigators, fierce, and they won that huge case against Oberlin College, as you remember, a few years ago. And it so fits their personality, right? I mean, it's really who they are. So, yeah, even law firms can be differentiated. And that's why this book was written for service businesses to say not only things that come out of the ground, like commodities, can be differentiated, but also services… professional services.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, and I think when we hear commodity, you and I, our minds go to people that — I don't want to cast dispersions — but it's maybe lazy thinking instead of smart thinking, right? Smart thinking, maybe that's a better way to say better people in that commercial you're talking about, but smart thinking is something that provides value in a service industry. Clients can really get good service anywhere, but proactive thought leadership is, I think in this day and age, in short supply and guess what's making it worse? All the chatter about AI. AI at its core is actually about copying everything. It's going out, it's big data, right? But that big data already exists. All it's doing is grabbing pieces-parts and putting it together in a different way that wasn't put together before. But the heart of the thinking can't change in that case.

So really, I think the way to explode this myth in that nothing needs to be a commodity is: apply smart thinking; apply passionate thinking, don't be lazy in your marketing. And that's the way that I would explode this myth.

Lorraine Kessler
Right. And sometimes it's thinking about: what's table stakes? If we're a law firm or we're a financial firm or whatever we are, what do we have to do? Because that is such a common that is expected by clientele so that it becomes table stakes. I have to do that, right? Like Dominos, if I'm going to make pizza, it has to be fairly good. And fast food can't be below that line doesn't have to be the best pizza in the world, but it has to meet a certain threshold. That's what we call table stakes. And then thinking now, how do I differentiate on top of that? So I think that's a way of it. And you just mentioned AI and that goes to our next myth, which is the myth that competition is to blame for commoditization. 

And while competition might be a result, it's not the cause of competition, of commoditization. The cause of it is this urge to copy, right? We as humans have a species, have a natural desire to copy, right? Mimic. Like you ever stay in a room and someone yawns and everybody starts yawning or, you know, you see people doing this and we tend to do that. I mean, we're very apish, right? It's just our makeup.

What we do is we have this urge, we take this kind of urge into the business and that's the root cause of commoditization. We think if our competitor is doing this, then somehow I have to do it without evaluating. 

Well, maybe they're doing it because it fits their differentiation better than my differentiation. If I don't have a differentiation, then I'm going to copy them and now I've just led to commoditizing my product and it leads to commoditization of entire categories. 

And we've also seen this in terms of how brands or how marketers market, right? You mentioned AI, but even before AI, look at what we used to call, or we sometimes have called the orthodoxy of how whole categories talk about healthcare, or they talk about legal or financial and they feel like they have to talk in these similar tones. Their marketing messages all sound alike. They show the same happy, satisfied people, right? You know, these stock images that appear everywhere and you see them on, you know, one person's billboard and another person's in the same category, which is the ultimate un-differentiation. 

So the problem with this is it erodes not only your distinction or differentiation, but it erodes pricing power. Because once you say, I'm like everybody else and you talk and look like everybody else, then you are now subject to what the market at large says, “I think this is what I should pay for the service or category.” 

So it's really one of the deadliest things. And it's so innateness that I understand why it's so hard for companies to break and marketers to break. So part of this, I think AI is taking the place of, you know, what we used to call the Deming best practices, right? And like I said earlier, don't stop at best practices. No one's telling you to have bad practices. We're telling you that, that might just be what's needed to bring you level, equal to. Now you have to layer on, “How are we different?” That's how you become incomparable, not competent.

Mark Vandegrift
Yep. Well, even in our industry, most people don't know there's 16,000 agencies in the US alone. Well, if that's not competition that should drive us to commoditization, now all we're doing is, is our hourly rate lower than everyone else's. But as we know, we have taken positioning to a specialist level that nobody else has. That's why we can claim this, and we have Jack Trout's endorsement for it. 

But we keep working at it. Even this podcast is about positioning, our blog articles about positioning, we keep reading books about it. And you have to work at differentiation, you can't just assume it. So I think that is, if you're trying to look at an industry and say, well, nobody has as many competitors as we do, well, we have 15,999. I don't know too many other clients that we have that could walk in and say that they have almost 16,000 competitors.

Lorraine Kessler
Right. And I remember in the 2000s, of course you know this because this is where you walked a lot of your career, where the website, the internet, digital started to come on, right? What did agencies do to differentiate? They became all web. They became all digital. And that gave them some lift for some amount of time.

The problem with that kind of differentiation, just for those who are listening, is based on a feature, right? Or a skill set that can be replicated quickly. So once the skillset’s replicated, those agencies had real trouble, because now they're no longer differentiated. How many digital agencies are there? How many web only? Not many, because being web only, tended to be about having the technical expertise of how to do a website or put it up. It didn't have anything to do with the psychology of what makes advertising and marketing work… how to craft a message. And so those agencies felt after about two decades, they got stuck in a trap, right? And then we saw them start saying, and “we do branding too!” Like, okay. okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, little tag on there. And the one I always love is everyone that you ever see in the ad agency world says, “we get results.” Well, great. Okay. Yeah.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah. What kind of results are you talking about? Right, yeah. And how come I don't recognize any of the people you work for, right? So, yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, yep, exactly. Good, well myth number four, and this one's interesting because we don't hear it a lot, and yet it's an unspoken statement that is a fact a lot, and that is we're not a brand. And where we see that a lot is with professional service firms, like law firms, ad agencies, believe it or not, we'll say that, accounting firms, they usually see themselves as consultants to work that has brands rather than being brands themselves. 

And I mentioned, I think two weeks ago when we were talking about developing and designing and building new categories, my TRIUMPH acronym that I like to use. Well, the H in that stands for heuristic. And for those that don't know what a heuristic is, it's a shortcut to either problem solve or to understand a concept.

And in its very basic feature, if you combine that with taxonomy and the need to classify, we put a label on everything. And I'll just give you a test here. Okay. I'm going to say this to our listeners. If right now I said to you, name the class clown in high school, you probably have a name pop in your head. Or if I say, call the person who always helps you when you have computer problems. Boom. We can shorten that to computer geek. Okay. Or name the person that you want to play Trivial Pursuit with.

Okay. So you have these names pop in your head. Well, that is the shortcut, the heuristic to something that we filed in our brain, which is the taxonomy. And at that point in time, that person – even a person – has a brand because it has a meaning to which I'm attaching the person's name. 

So the fact that you say you're not a brand is just a myth that's so easy to explode just using human nature, just the way the mind works. And I think what we find in these firms where they say that is that, well, people hire me because of who I network with or because someone referred me. But, you know, when you get referral, it's like asking, “what's a good movie that you saw lately” or “what's a good restaurant that you went to?”

They're not just going to go, I went over here. You're going to ask the next question, which is, well, why? Yeah. So, Hey Lorraine, tell me about a good Italian restaurant. And you're going to say whatever the restaurant is. And then I'm going to go, what'd you like about it? Well, now you're automatically giving me something to file into my mind. Now I may or may not agree with you after I go to that restaurant. The fact is, is that now that concept is always going to be buried in my brain because you've labeled it for me.

So everything has a brand regardless because once you get the meaning into the brain… boom, that's where you've branded it, just like the cows.

Lorraine Kessler
Right. And that is the perception and that's the thing that drives. So that's my perception. That's the image I get. What people fail to look at is it's really important in terms of employees, right? Because how they think about your company, their perception they have has a lot to do with their behavior, right? 

They, people walk lighter or float if they really feel they're working for a brand that has meaning beyond the doors of just the agency. And you're right, when someone refers somebody, whether it's an accountant or a financial, they're going to say, I really like this firm because, right? They're super responsive or they share, they're so smart. They share market information I haven't gotten anywhere else, right? 

They're going to share part of that brand story with you. They're not just going to give a name. Well, here's a list of names, you know, like they're like you Googled a bunch of accounting firms near me, right? Anybody can do that now. So I don't need a referral. And so really when you, when we worked with clients on positioning, one of the questions we would ask those who would say, well, my whole business is driven by referral. I'm sure it is, but why are people referring you? You asked the why question. Why are they referring you because let's see if we can find something in that to build on in terms of your marketing to make that the overall perception.

Mark Vandegrift
Absolutely. There's two exercises that I would encourage our listeners to do if they feel like they work for a company that says they don't have a brand. The first is: write a list of all your competitors and what your perception is of your competitors. And ask yourself, well, if I have a perception about my competitors, they certainly have a perception about me. And at that point in time, you can say, well, then I guess I have a brand.

The other thing, the other exercise to do is if you have a lot of reviews on your particular business, if you have a lot of Google reviews, or if you're in the restaurant industry and you're on Yelp, then read through those reviews and what you'll find is there's a recurring theme. 

Like, “I love their short ribs!” And another review says, “they have the best short ribs in the world.” “And boy, who can find a better short rib in the area?” So all of a sudden now that restaurants known for their short ribs. And I know Lorraine, as I say that you're probably thinking of the same place. We won't give them free advertising though. No.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. They don't need it because it's a closed market. But they do have a brand, right. Right.

Mark Vandegrift
Yep. Very good. So they do, they do. It goes beyond short ribs, but it is funny when people talk about them that that's what they think. So.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah. I mean, how do you become elite? But anyway, I think that's a real, and I think a key point for people to understand is what you're saying is if you don't work on honing what brand perception you want that differentiates you, then you already have a brand by default. Let's say your perception is they have great short ribs, but everything else they do is bad. That may not be the perception you want, right? So you have one by default.

So, you have to be intentional about the position that you're able to have, what you can do best in the world and stand out doing, and then hone that into your message and your marketing versus just allowing it to kind of just build on something that maybe isn't important to you or isn't big enough.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. I have a funny story for you. And these are from our friends at ForeverLawn. Brian and Dale have a podcast. So, a shout out to them. They were talking one time about, they were driving their, I think it was just a pickup truck down the road. They were pulling something and they pulled off at an exit ramp and all of a sudden the trailer goes right past them that they were supposedly pulling.

So I use that as an illustration at one point, which was, you know, we're all pulling a brand or a meaning behind us. The question is, is it taking its own direction and flying by us? Right. And we want it always tethered to us. So if you don't work on it, it could have that potential to just fly off on its own.

Lorraine Kessler
That's right. Right. Didn't that happen when you were driving us somewhere and somebody's thing came on hitch?

Mark Vandegrift
No, no, no. The actual trailer started to cause the truck to do its own thing and it flipped over on the truck. It never detached. And it was in a snowstorm. Yeah, that's a different… we'll probably apply that in the future here.

Yep. So I think what we'll do here is stop. We have a lot of myths to go through. And we got through four today. And Lorraine, any other thoughts on our first four?

Lorraine Kessler
No, I think that's, I hope that helps people who are thinking about their company to maybe come at it from a different perspective. Not from the perspective of just continuous improvement, which is again, we're saying is important, or making sure you meet table stakes and that you're delivering at least within what's needed within the category and a common need or expectation within the category. But that they come at it with, well, what can we do uniquely, differently that sets us apart and that adds value to what we're selling in a way that's meaningful to the target audience we really want to cultivate. 

And I never want people to walk away and thinking that you're trying to be all things to all people. That's not… you have to decide with positioning and this sometimes becomes the snafu where people fall off the wagon is that they feel like I don't want to alienate these types of customers. But you have to choose a distinctive customer who cares a lot about your difference. 

If I were a financial services company, for example, and I worked with a lot of private business CEOs, I might want to focus on that as differentiation… be expert with private business CEOs because private business CEOs have unique circumstances that separate them from public companies and that they share in common. And now you have an expertise. And does that mean I might get a company that's a smaller public company? Sure. They'll come to me because they'll say, you know, we're actually more like a private company than a big public company. So you'll still get… don't worry about that from a sales standpoint.

So anyway, that would be my last comment on what we talked about.

Mark Vandegrift
Can I shorten that by saying, don't be greedy? That's what it comes to. It really does.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, don't be greedy. Yeah. yeah. Don't be like most American business people. Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, thank you for joining us for today's episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. If you haven't liked, shared, commented, subscribed, and Lorraine, say it again, subscribed. Please do. We appreciate all of our listeners and until next time, have an amazing day.