Oppositio Singularis: The Positioner's Folly

David sees too many marketing agencies trying to attract new business by staking claims of specialness on things for which nobody is claiming the opposite, instead of building their positioning on uniquely defined expertise.

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, oppositio singularis, the positioner's folly. Hoc disputamus. [chuckles] I've been studying Latin for five minutes.

[laughter]

We're holding you back a year. We're holding you back for another five minutes. [laughs] Hold me back 59 years.

David Baker: I'm just frankly tired of all this unjust criticism of people. Maybe it's just you who say that--

Blair: No, it's not.

David: Who say the titles, like come up with for my podcast episodes aren't as good as yours. It's like, okay, I'm fixing that. Oppositio singularis. Do you play the Latin card?

Blair: Yes. Oppositio singularis. The positioner's folly.

David: You like that. It has a good ring to it, doesn't it? You like it. Just honestly, tell me. Do you like it?

Blair: I love it. I don't hate this. I know what I hate, and I don't hate it.

David: [laughs] I know what that means. That means it sucks. That's also like you saying, well, that wasn't your best work, David. [chuckles]

Blair: That was the critique I was told as a young account exec in advertising. That's what you say to creative people when they share the concepts with you. I know what I hate, and I don't hate this.

[laughter]

Oh, gosh. Okay, what does it mean? Oppositio singularis?

David: Singularis, yes. What it means is that you need to quit claiming all the things for which nobody else is claiming the opposite.

Blair: Hold on. Say that again.

David: Say, if you were going to create a dating profile, and you said, I'll open the door for you, and I'll pay at least half the bill, and I'll listen to you at dinner. Okay, well, those are all good things. Check, check, check, yes, but is anybody claiming the opposite? Does this set you apart from anybody? Is nobody saying, well, you know what? I'll tell you the truth. I don't open doors anymore. I just discovered that it's extra work, and I want to go through first. If she can't stop from hitting her head on the door, maybe I don't want to. If nobody's claiming the opposite, this is not very powerful as a positioning tool. If you read through the positioning statements on agency websites, they are full of this shit that basically is making big claims that nobody is claiming the opposite of. I don't understand it. I don't know how we got there. It's just nonsense.

Blair: It reminds me of the Twitter profiles I used to see when I was on Twitter. Husband, father, patriot, Christian. I always wanted to write whatever the opposite of all of that was. Of course, I never had the guts to because you'd see it everywhere. That tells me nothing about you.

David: Pagan, divorced four times.

[laughter]

Gave my kids up for adoption. Well, what does say something about you probably is the order you put those things in, but we'll leave that aside. This just came to mind recently because we were doing an event in Atlanta. Jonathan and I were. We called it the mini-TBR, and we had, I think, 16 firms there. We asked people to send ahead of time a brief two-paragraph note about what set them apart in the marketplace. They knew they were walking into a trap because they've read my stuff before.

Then we got to the event, and I say, hey, Kate, can you expand on this just a little bit? Here are the kinds of things that people said, knowing that I'm in the room. They said, now, I know everyone says that their strategy is great, but ours really is, or our team is really great, the best around. I know everybody else says the same thing, but we really mean it, or we've got a process, and actually, it's a proven one, a wink-wink. We know it's not really proven, but this is what you just say.

We use it with every client. Because of that, it's like, now, other people have processes, but this one is different. How did we get to this point where the people who are in charge of positioning products and services cannot do it for themselves? It just blows my mind. These things are important, right? Here's the big distinction I would make. Yes, okay. Your clients are going to notice if you don't listen. They're going to notice if you're not strategic. They're going to notice if you don't have a good team. They're not going to notice that until they're already a client. These are the things that are not disprovable or provable until they become a client. They're the reason that your clients stay with you, not the reason they come to you in the first place.

Maybe make that a part of your story, but it's not on the front window of your storefront like this sets you apart. It just isn't. I just thought, okay, where's this is happening? What struck me is that if nobody is claiming the opposite, like if nobody's saying, yes, yes, we used to do that strategy thing. It just really slowed, deadbeat dad. I hate sports, devil worshiper.

[laughter]

Blair: In the absence of that, your claim is meaningless.

David: Yes. I don't know. Maybe this is a four-minute episode this time because there's not too much more to say about it, but I just want to tell people listening, make a distinction between why clients stay with you and why they come to you in the first place. If your website is largely interchangeable with everybody else's, it's just not going to be very powerful for you.

Blair: Is it so much that if somebody's not taking the opposite side of this argument, then it's not a valid argument if we think of your positioning as an argument? Is it that or is it that? I think you make a point here somewhere in your notes. Take the value proposition that you're leading with, the reason why you should hire us, and then call around to your competitors and ask them if they make the same value proposition.

David: Yes, right. In my mind, I have this vision of a story unfolding where you get way close to getting hired by this client, and what the client really loves about your story is that you are strategic, you've got great people, you've got a process, all that stuff. Then somebody raises their hand on the new-to-be client side and says, hey, you know what, right before we pull the plug on our existing agency and we hire this new one, can we just check around? Let's ask this agency's competitors, hey, do you have a process? Are your people good? Do you do strategy at the beginning of every engagement? They do that, and everybody's going to say they do. Do you think this is going to set you apart? It's like, no.

Blair: I remember the first time I heard a leader in an organization I was working at, say, the assets of this company go down the elevator at 5 PM every day. First of all, 5 PM was a lie. It was much later than that. I thought, oh, that's a really nice thing to say. It is a nice thing to say, and it's a nice thing to believe. I think in any knowledge-based business, it's a true statement. Your point is, just because it's true, it doesn't mean it's different.

David: It's not differentiating. Yes.

Blair: That's the table stakes in every organization. A great team, lots of talent, codified processes, the ability to think strategically about the work that you're going to do for your clients. All of these things are valuable. They're important. To your point, you'll get fired for not having them, but you're not going to get hired because you have them.

David: Yes, that's a very good way to state it. It's almost like back to the dating profile thing. I can walk, and I can talk. It's like, oh, good to know. What else do I need to know? Yes. I was thinking about this. I had some time to kill. I was in a waiting room of a repair shop a couple weeks ago.

Blair: In Lebanon?

David: In Lebanon, right? Not that Lebanon, but the Lebanon just north of Nashville. I thought, okay, I'm just going to pretend like I need to hire an agency. I'm going to do a Google search. I went into private mode, so it didn't inherit any of the earlier stuff I'd done. I found the firm that I should hire. That's a joke. This is what they said about themselves.

Blair: Can I ask you, what did you search for? Do you remember the search phrase?

David: Marketing firm near me.

Blair: Did you find a firm called marketing near me?

David: No. Like the dentist near me? No, I didn't. I just thought marketing firm near me.

Blair: I met the owner of a business last week. I was speaking at a conference. The name of their business was Best, and then business type, then the state. I thought, oh my God, talk about naming your business for SEO.

David: Like in the old days of the phone book, it's like AAA towing. It sorts to the top. This firm, I didn't even write down the name. I didn't want to get them in trouble, but here's what they said about themselves what makes them unique. We work for brands that refuse to settle. Okay, is there anybody out there? [laughs] We are industry leading. It's like nobody's saying we're third in the industry, but the first two are really, they're expensive. Don't bother with them.

We're award winning. Our proprietary framework for paid media guides. Every single ad dollar. World-class digital partners who deliver real growth. Performance first. Senior operators trusted by brands from startup to category leaders. It's like this means nothing, people. Here's an interesting way to think about this if you flip this around. If you said, okay, tell me some things that are true about you that are not dismissive of your competitors where they are actually better than you are.

I had a sales call this morning with a prospective client. I said, all right, there's probably two things you could do. One is you could hire me to do this for you. The other is maybe you need to work with a coach. I'm just not a good coach. I don't mean that dismissively. I mean it honestly because I don't want to get in an arrangement with a client who thinks I am somebody that I'm not. Can you say if this is important, then you probably should hire, and then you actually give somebody the name of a competitor. That would be powerful positioning, rather than this.

What this is, is you're opening your arms up really wide and say, hey, hire me. You're not helping them be choosy. You're just giving them all the things they want to see. If nobody's claiming the opposite, then you need to stop putting these at the top of the list. Have I said that before?

Blair: Yes. That's where I was going with this. Have you said this before? [laughs] I was recently thinking there's two things I never want to write about or talk about again. One is positioning, and I felt that way for a long time. Because what I want to say to the listener about positioning is you're not being honest with yourself about the claims you're making, and you're not doing the hard work, making the difficult decision and doing the hard work. That's all I want to say about positioning.

Timesheets, you're basing the operations of your business on a lie there. That's all there is to say on those two things. Now do whatever you want. I don't care. That's how I feel about it, and pay my bill. How much are you going to charge him to tell him those two things over and over again? If you're listening, and if you found value in that statement, it's Blair at winwithoutpitching.com. Just send me some money.

David: Venmo me some money. What's the call to action here? I want you to go to your website, and I want you to look at the primary claims, and I want you to see if anybody is claiming the opposite. If they aren't, then I want you to have a better story in your positioning. All this stuff, it doesn't mean anything. I don't even think you need to say it. Your clients, if they buy your positioning arguments, they're going to come to you, and they're going to discover that all these things are true of you, and that's why they're going to stay with you, but those are not the same things that you use to attract people in the first place because, like you said, they're sort of the cost of doing business. They're table stakes, right? We talk about these as if they're so unique. Come to my restaurant. It's like, we have dishes. We have utensils. You should come to our restaurant.

Blair: One of Charlie Munger's mental models was invert, invert, invert, always invert. It's a good practice to take the words that you're using and invert them, and just try on what the opposite of the meaning is. It's not a mathematical proof, so it's not 100% effective that way, but if nobody's claiming the opposite, then it's probably a little hint there.

David: Oppositio singularis, my friend.

Blair: Oh, okay. There we go. Oppositio singularity. David, if you were going to write the epitaph on the tombstone of the independent marketing agency business, what would it say?

David: [chuckles] The marketing field, the most undifferentiated firms in the world, helping you differentiate your company and message. You really should have hired us. That'll be on their tombstone.

Blair: Oh my God. This could have been a spoof episode, but people, it is not. Thank you, David.

David: Thank you, Blair.