Ulli Appelbaum is a world-renowned expert on brand positioning and the author of “The Brand Positioning Workbook”.
Whiter teeth – or fewer cavities? Longer lasting – or more reliable? Everyday low prices – or quality and selection? Tastes great – or healthier for you? Driving performance – or comfort and luxury? All are examples of brand positioning options in different market categories.
The concept of brand positioning has been part of the marketing canon for over fifty years. Pretty much every marketing organization now uses a positioning statement as the strategic overture to any sort of brand identity work or communication plan. So why, after so many years, do positioning exercises often fail to break new ground or yield much in the way of strategic value?
The method for crafting a positioning statement is taught in every marketing course. It gets explained in every book about branding. There are countless YouTube tutorials. And there are many positioning templates available to follow, all of which adhere more or less to the same construct (“For [name the target segment], Is a [name the market category], Which Provides [name the main benefit], Unlike [name the top competitor]”.
For a lot of marketers, however, brand positioning is nothing more than a “fill in the blanks” obligation. Just another hoop to go through on their way to the fun creative stuff. Which is a shame – because the right positioning can pay off many times over in winning a greater share of mind amongst consumers. And that’s what branding is supposed to be about – finding a “window on the mind”, in the immortal words of Al Ries and Jack Trout.
Those are the two ad guys who popularized the idea of brand positioning in the early 1970s. They wrote a series of articles for Advertising Age in 1972 called “The Positioning Era Cometh”, declaring that creativity must take a back seat to strategy (later converting their thesis into one of the most influential marketing books of all time called “Positioning: A Battle for Your Mind”). In an era of “me too” products, they argued, the minds of consumers are overwhelmed by choice, making it hard for them to distinguish one brand from another. To break through the clutter, ad messaging had to focus on differentiation, making clear to people why the brand deserved to be considered ahead of the alternatives. That way, the brand could “position itself” in the minds of busy people by narrowing the main message to why it uniquely meets their needs.
Today that formula for advertising success has become conventional wisdom. But back then, it was heresy. Agencies at that time made their money selling clients on Big Creative Ideas. On expensive image-building ad campaigns. By declaring that creativity by itself is worthless, these two iconoclasts were impugning an entire industry. However, in the end, they won their rightful place in history. The creative guild eventually came around to the idea that strategy should indeed come first.
So you would think that by now marketers would have perfected the practice of brand positioning – that, after five decades, they would understand what the legendary David Ogilvy once said, “The results of your advertising depend less on how you write your advertising than on how your product is positioned”. But brand positioning is tough slogging. It’s a brain teasing exercise. When marketers merely go through the motions, they end up with vapid positioning statements. Getting it right demands divergent thinking, according to Ulli Appelbaum, an acclaimed expert on brand positioning, taking the time to examine the problem from as many angles as possible. But most marketers think that level of effort is more bother than it’s worth.
The purpose of brand positioning, Appelbaum says, is to find the right set of “associations” that you want people to connect with your brand (an “association” being what you want a person to immediately think of when they come across the brand). He’s defined 26 possible positioning platforms that can be used as a springboard for development and lays out his methodology in a very practical guide he wrote called “The Brand Positioning Workbook”.
I started by asking Ulli if he used that methodology to come up with the quirky name of his brand strategy agency.
Ulli Appelbaum (UA): No, it was actually the result of a very chaotic and fun brainstorm. And unfortunately, too much liquor was involved, to be very candid. But ultimately, the name stuck with me, and has stuck for the last…the name is like 20 years old now, because it really captures what I do and what I believe in, which is strategy first. You got to know where you want to go before you start the journey, so to say. But I also believe that strategy is a creative problem-solving exercise. So, it’s when you develop a positioning platform, you develop hypotheses of what the potential solution could be. That is a creative process. And so, basically, “First The Trousers Then The Shoes” is a creative take on saying strategy needs to go first. And that’s how the name came about. And then the following day I woke up with a headache, and loved the name out of the list of all the ones we had generated, and it’s stuck ever since.
Stephen Shaw (SS): Yeah. And would it have been stretching out a bit too far to say, put your underwear on first, I presume.