Public relations, advertising, and marcom all reflect the company’s
"position." Positioning is darned important, then. Strategic, even.
And if you’re a marketing consultant, positioning is where the big bucks are.
You’re right there at the top of the marketing totem pole.
Positioning is not only lucrative for its practitioners, it’s also fun,
since it’s usually done on a blank piece of paper. "Who do we want to
be?" asks the positioning expert. "Are we the maker of the world’s
finest timepieces? No, maybe we’re the people who keep business on time. Ooh,
maybe we’re the company that’s making punctuality into a fashion
accessory!" Undoubtedly, someone will trump these suggestions by saying,
"We’re not really about watches at all," and then, in a solemn voice:
"We’re the Time Company."
Often, "positioning exercises" become expensive sojourns into
corporate psychology. The consultant gets to spend time with one group leader
after another, performing the role of corporate shrink. The resulting data is
impossible to connect, but that doesn’t matter, because the goal is only to
come up with a "statement." And all that statement has to be is
marginally different from every other company’s faked-up statement. Never mind
that nobody in the marketplace gives a damn about any company’s positioning
statement. It only matters that this statement will "drive the
strategy," which will be yet another advertising and PR bombing campaign.
Can it get more arrogant? Well, actually, yes.
Positioning wasn’t even an issue until 1972, when Al Ries and Jack Trout
wrote a series of articles for Advertising Age and then authored one of the
top-selling business books of all time, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.
The goal of positioning, Trout says, is to own one word in your customer’s
mind. For evidence, you don’t even need to leave your own skull. Take a look:
you’ll find Fedex in the "overnight" position, Crest in the
"cavities" position, and Volvo in the "safety" position,
even if you never buy those products. In the battlefield of your mind, those
companies are entrenched in those positions.
Why one word? Because to Trout and Ries, the human mind is as closed as a
clam and just as roomy. Witness Jack Trout’s "five basic principles of the
mind," from The New Positioning:
- Minds are limited.
- Minds hate confusion.
- Minds are insecure.
- Minds don’t change.
- Minds lose focus.
In short, minds are so pathetic that they desperately need help, even if it
comes in the form of an axe. That’s what positioning is for.
Too bad, because positioning actually is about something much more
important, something that gets trivialized by those who reduce it to generating
a catchy tagline. Positioning is about discovering who you, as a business, are
-- discovering your identity, not inventing a new one willy-nilly. Positioning
should help a company become what it is, not something it’s not (no matter how
cool it would be).
A company can certainly try to be what it’s not. But the market
conversation will expose the fakery. One clue is any attempt by a company to
deny its history, because history is one of those things that just can’t be
changed. GM will always be the product of Alfred Sloan’s preference for
implementation over innovation, Apple will always come from Steve Jobs’s
artistic temperament, Hewlett-Packard will always come from its founders’
obsession with quality products for niche technical markets, Nordstrom will
always come from the family’s original shoe business.
Of course companies and products can change their identities (and even
their natures) over time. Volkswagen no longer bears (for most of us) the
history stated in its very name: Hitler’s car for the proud German people.
Kellogg’s Razzle Dazzle Rice Krispies no longer bear much connection to the
obsessive health concerns of the company’s founder. But such changes generally
are gradual and often painful. In fact, if they are too rapid and too easy, the
market conversation will be merciless in exposing the phoniness it sniffs.
There are other clues that a company is having an identity crisis:
- Is there a spark of life in its marketing materials? Do they smack of focus groups and the safety of the lowest common denominator, or do they take the risk of being as interesting as its best customers?
- Do its marketing programs keep people out or invite them in? Do they help customers and prospects make connections to the relevant employees?
- Is the company able to admit a mistake? Can employees admit they disagree with management decisions or the latest marketing mantra? Or must they always explain why everything is perfect in this, the best of all possible companies?
- Is the company so jealous of its "image" that it has surgically implanted a lawyer where its sense of humor used to be?
- Does it drill its employees on the corporate catechism, or can the workers tell stories that for them capture the essence of what the company is about?
- Do the employees routinely sign their e-mail "Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the management"?
These indicators have a common theme. Each points to a gap between who your
company is and what it says it is. The gap is where inauthenticity lives, and
the exposure of the gap constitutes corporate embarrassment. Much of marketing
is devoted to papering over that gap. Deming gave the deathless advice:
"Drive out fear." We might add: and drive out shame.
But how can a business be authentic? Authenticity describes whether someone
truly owns up to what she or he actually is. Since corporations and businesses
aren’t individuals, ultimately their authenticity is rooted in the employees.
If the company is posing, then the people who are the company will have to pose
as well. If, on the other hand, the company is comfortable living up to what it
is, then an enormous cramp in the corporate body language goes away. The
marketing people won’t create throwaway lines that are clever but false. The
sales folk will walk away from the "sales opportunities" that the
company is better off losing than having to support. The product developers
won’t propose features that look good on paper but do their customers no real
good.
None of this has to do with one-word positioning statements, press release
boilerplate, or pledging allegiance to corporate goals before every company
meeting. It has to be learned in the heart, not by rote. What we learn through
memorization affords us no spontaneity. We can recite the right words, but
they’re not our own -- we can’t riff on them. The market conversation can spot
marketing recitatives within two syllables because the Web thrives on
spontaneity. We are all so tuned to the sound of the real human voice that,
given a chance to interact, we can’t be fooled... at least not for long.
And if a company is genuinely confused about what it is, there’s an easy
way to find out: listen to what your market says you are. If it’s not to your
liking, think long and hard before assuming that the market is wrong, composed
of a lot of people who just are too dumb or blind to understand the Inner You.
If you’ve been claiming to be the Time Company for two years but the market
still thinks of you as the Overpriced Executive Trophy Watchmaker, then, sorry,
but that’s your position. If you don’t like what you’re hearing, the marketing
task is not to change the market’s idea of who you are but actually to change
who you are. And that can take a generation: look at Volkswagen.
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