Positions we hold, stated plainly enough to disagree with.
Something I have noticed reading marketing writing, including ours from a few years ago, is how little of it can be disagreed with.
It is not that the writing is bad. It is that almost every sentence has been sanded down to the point where no reasonable person could object, which sounds like professionalism and is actually the opposite. If nobody can argue with your position, you have not taken one. You have described the weather.
That is a strange way to behave in a business that sells judgment. So once a year we write down what we actually think, in the language we use in the room rather than the language that would survive a committee.
Ten of them. Some of these have cost us work.
1. Most content problems are clarity problems in a costume. A team arguing about what to post is nearly always a team that has not agreed on what the company is. Fix the second thing and the first argument stops happening on its own.
2. Posting daily is a confession. It says nobody is confident that any individual piece will do anything, so the plan is frequency. Occasionally that is the right call. It should be a decision, not a default.
3. A brand cannot be both careful and memorable. Every round of caution removes the specific thing somebody might have remembered. The safest version of your positioning is the one nobody can repeat back to you.
4. Rebrand is often the most expensive way to avoid a decision. The decision is one sentence about what the company is. The rebrand is what gets commissioned instead, because it has a budget line and the sentence does not.
5. Nobody has ever been moved by a value like integrity. If the opposite of your stated value is something no company would ever claim, you have not said anything. A value worth writing down is one that a reasonable competitor would decline to share.
6. Guidelines do not hold brands. Systems do. A document asks busy people to be disciplined at their busiest moment. A system makes the right thing the easy thing. Only one of those survives a bad quarter.
7. Six weeks is not evidence. Neither is one campaign. If you cannot commit to holding a direction long enough for a market to notice it, spend less. Do not buy good thinking and abandon it in month seven.
8. If you cannot name what you stopped doing this year, you do not have a strategy. You have ambitions. Strategy is visible in the cuts. Everything else is a wish list with a deck around it.
9. Awareness is the wrong goal. Being understood is the goal. Plenty of companies are known and misunderstood, which is worse than being unknown, because the misunderstanding is now doing the selling on your behalf.
10. Your real competitor is sameness. Not the other firm. The fact that everyone in your category answers the same question the same way, so the buyer defaults to price, or to whoever replied first. The way out is a position with some tension in it, held long enough to be believed.
Some of these are arguable and we know it. That is rather the point of writing them down.
A studio that never says anything falsifiable is not offering judgment. It is offering agreement, and agreement is not worth paying for.
