To understand why so many agency positioning statements fall into word-soup superficiality, it’s useful to unpack how these lines are born.
When business needs a boost, agencies often turn to the grand panacea – a repositioning exercise. Unfortunately, the typical methodology isn’t just painful and time-consuming, it’s also ineffective. But that doesn’t stop it being repeated.
I call this costly cycle of hype and wasted energy the ‘Positioning Carousel’.
It starts when you decide that a new positioning will surely herald a new era of success. And if your capabilities include brand building, copywriting or hubris, you probably approach the task with a mindset of ‘we’ve got this’.
To get things moving, someone – usually your Strategy Director – writes some provocations. You might also brief your Creative Director to distil these ‘big ideas’ into pithy headlines.
Unfortunately, although they’re both smart and motivated, they’re rarely B2B specialists and they’re certainly not experts in agency positioning. Oh, and they’re also super stacked with their day jobs.
Early warning signs
These limitations become clear in the initial outputs. Without a meaningful exploration of where you’re going, ‘vision’ rarely extends beyond ‘win better clients’, ‘growth’ or ‘make more money’.
A clear sense of ‘why’ is also often missing. And if you don’t define an ownable target audience, then timidly trying to be all things to all people gets baked in from the start.
At this point, with your ‘where’, ‘why’ and ‘who’ all unexplored, the most promising candidate statements are ‘socialised’. That’s agency-speak for ‘awkwardly shared so the people with the most political clout can exert their influence to choose the option that best suits them’. Refinements are discussed, follow-up meetings are scheduled and the process rolls on, often for months.
Eventually, twin pressures build. Your need for impact reaches fever pitch and the appetite for debate dwindles. So et voilà, your undercooked thinking is deemed ready by default. At best, it’s a catchy line that rhymes – or at least something pleasingly alliterative (in English, anyway). And your new positioning finally emerges to a weird mix of relief and self-conscious fanfare.
Predicting failure
By this stage, the evidence of likely failure is plain to see. Perhaps surprisingly, Exhibit A is your own cast-iron conviction. If your new positioning was anchored in something solid, that wouldn’t be a problem.
But because it isn’t, your lack of doubt suggests you’re overinvested. Like a patient hiring a high-end shrink who charges a king’s ransom, the idea of wasting that much cash is terrifying. Little wonder your faith is unshakeable.
Hollow positivity also shows up in the absence of internal dissent. Aside from your team’s reluctance to use the new positioning (they do well to hide that from you), you’re given suspiciously consistent feedback that it’s definitely the answer.
You’re told that ‘it’s landing well with clients’ and even the naysayers have miraculously become advocates. You push thoughts of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ to the back of your mind.
Passing the client test
The real moment of truth, as ever, is pitch success. If your fortunes rise with your snazzy new line, it’s hailed a success. But if your fortunes decline or stay put, it’s condemned as a failure and you’re crushingly back to square one – minus a fair chunk of your credibility.
But what are clients actually reacting to? Being too provocative was carefully avoided, so you offered them a statement so benign they would struggle to disagree. And such is the similarity of agency positioning statements, that after seeing a handful of presentations, clients rarely remember one from another.
So is your new ‘positioning’ really the reason for success or failure? What about your team, their confidence or their thinking? And wait, surely it’s ‘all about the work’ or your people being your ‘biggest differentiator’?
The irony is tragicomic. First you invest months crafting a pithy slogan that you ordain with godlike powers of converting sceptical prospects into paying believers. Then after a couple of losses, you emphasise its superficiality by ditching it in a heartbeat.
Let’s get real. You pitch your positioning as a deeply held belief, but really it’s just some cool shit designed to stick in the client’s mind. You’re living the old joke often credited to Groucho Marx, “These are my principles, and if you don’t like them I have others.”
It’s a tiring loop of navel-gazing and failure to grow, punctuated by the occasional new leader who’s doomed to repeat the whole sorry process.
A modern approach to differentiation
I’ll spare you the hard sell here, but there’s definitely a different way of doing this – baking in longevity, client-centricity and an ownable competitive advantage. We call it creating your Market of One.