A Story about Positioning: Selling the Brownie, Not the Recipe
How Warby Parker took a pretty crappy recipe and baked a really good brownie...
I recently heard the political consultant Anat Shanker-Osorio talking about public policy, and I thought her advice to politicians also applies to software companies:
Sell the brownie, not the recipe.
In policy circles that means talking about how new programs or bills will benefit constituents, rather than talking about the mechanisms of how the policy works. That might be “you’ll be guaranteed health care when you’re sick” rather than, “Obamacare works by creating an exchange platform for insurance etc etc etc.”
Software companies, too, like to talk about the recipe, because the founders of the company often (nearly always?) created the recipe.
But successful messaging comes from the brownie. Today I wanted to share a great brownie.
I’m sitting in my living room. Under foot are 7 or 8 boxes from Zappos, each with a pair of boots, some size 8 1/2, some size 9.
My daughters will be doing some hiking this summer, apparently the type of hiking that can’t be done in the hiking boots they currently own. We bought a whole bunch of pairs from Zappos, they tried them on, and later today we’ll box most of it back up and return it to Zappos.
Magic.
Much has been written about Zappos’ incredible customer service because the customer service is incredible (n.b. - it’s much easier for people to love your product if you give them a product they will love).
They created an experience that was 10x better than the two alternatives - ordering shoes online and praying that they fit because they alternative was miserable, or going to your local shoe store, which had a limited selection.
They created a product that - in hindsight - seems wildly obvious: why not have a massive selection and just let people order whatever they want and return shoes for free? Brilliant.
But what if your product or service isn’t 10x better than the alternative? What if it’s worse? Because, let’s face it, odds are your product isn’t 10x better.
When people have written about Warby Parker, they’ve typically addressed one of two things:
The $95 bargain price.
The Home Try-On program they created (whereby you can try on 5 pairs of glasses at home for free).
I wanted to write about them because Warby Parker gets no credit for their true innovation:
They created the most masterful positioning I’ve ever seen.
From the very first issue of Gobbledy (back in 1872…cover story: “Enterprise cowboy hat differentiation in a crowded cowboy hat market…yer doing it wrong, pardner”), we’ve been pushing the notion that software companies have skipped the difficult work around positioning and are left spewing nonsense to compensate.
Warby Parker shows why positioning matters.
And if it isn’t clear (because it isn’t always clear) positioning is determining the market you’re competing against, and the means of that competition.
Although the breathless articles written about Warby’s $95 glasses rarely mentioned it, cheap glasses were available before they came along. Cheap, stylish glasses existed before Warby. Cheap, stylish glasses available online existed before Warby.
But Warby Parker didn’t position themselves against online glasses sellers. They positioned themselves against evil glasses giant Luxottica, and spoke frequently about how Luxottica charges $500 for glasses. Here’s one of the founders in an interview in 2011.
“Warby Parker designs and produces vintage-inspired frames with prescription lenses for $95 whereas it would typically cost $500…When you look at an industry and you see that there's this one company [Luxottica] that's doing roughly $7 billion a year in revenue and we're finding that those glasses are being marked up more than 20 times what they cost to manufacture…we thought that there had to be a better way. And low and behold, we discovered that you could provide the same quality of glasses but for much lower price about $95…So for our customers, it would be exceptional value, that $500 product at $95.”
That was basically the message they used in every interview they gave. Luxottica is evil and charges $500 for glasses. We can sell those same glasses for $95 because of disruption. Or “disruption,” since that was a word every startup used to say 10 years ago.1
Brilliant thing, brilliantly executed #1: Clear positioning, and consistently using messaging based on that positioning. $500 $500 $500 $500 $500. Luxottica Luxottica Luxottica Luxottica Luxottica. In every interview2.
Their second positioning innovation was actually even more impressive - and this is the brownie.
Zappos had already been around for more than 10 years when Warby Parker was founded and had already reset expectations around online customer service. Buying as many pairs of shoes as you wanted and being able to return them all for free was already the norm online. It was, however, an expensive norm for the company, and their customer service policies cost the company dearly.
Warby created a much, much more restrictive return policy - You could only buy 5 pairs at a time, and you couldn’t keep the one that you wanted; you had to return it. Then they would send you the pair you wanted. Also, sometimes there weren’t enough pairs in stock to try on because other people were trying them on.
Explaining all that (the recipe) would be a tough sell. Unless you positioned it as “The Warby Parker Home Try-On Program.”
This is why positioning matters. If you skip the positioning, their policy seems like a ridiculously restrictive, wildly customer unfriendly approach to customer service, especially when compared to Zappos, the market leader in online customer service and returns. In other words, the recipe is meh.
But they did the positioning work and, instead, compared themselves to the nonsense of going into an optical store and dealing with the upselling and expensive glasses there. And because of that, their restrictive return policy was branded as the “Home Try-On Program” and heralded as being ingenious.
The program wasn’t ingenious, but the messaging and positioning of it was.
So much so that a few years later this article found that more than 400 companies were trying to be the next “Warby Parker of X.”
Except none of them were, because they thought that Warby was successful because they sold stylish stuff a bit cheaper than the alternative. Those companies didn’t do the hard work.
Brilliant thing, brilliantly executed #2: Turning a shortcoming into a powerful positive value.
Fun* exercise for you: Get 3 of your coworkers together and spend an hour thinking of your product’s biggest shortcoming. Then come up with a list of ways you could position it as a positive for your target customers.
*(“fun”)
There are two keys to making this exercise effective:
Defining the enemy. Who’s your Luxottica? It doesn’t have to be a company. It can be an idea (“doing things manually” is an effective enemy).
Being comfortable narrowing down your target market (and letting go of non-target markets), and then telling them why you’re better than the enemy. You don’t have to be better than everyone.
(Just a note on number 2 — you will get pushback on this. Letting go of non-target markets is very, very uncomfortable for your sales team, even though letting go will make the sales process easier. You will be blamed for any slips in revenue, because you narrowed the number of targets. And because you work in marketing. And part of our job in marketing is to be blamed. Except for you. You’re doing a great job. Keep up the good work! I wish you the best of luck.)
Every shortcoming you have can be re-cast as a chocolatey brownie.
Warby did it by calling the collection of subpar policies a “program.” Smart. Everyone wants to be a part of program.
Missing some of the sophisticated features of your more mature competitors? “Easy implementation” “For XXX who want to focus on revenue, not implementation” “Everything you need, with none of the fluff”. “The Gobbledy Jump-Start Program.” Whatever.
Do you need an expensive team of system implementers to get up and running? “Backed by an army of experts.”
Don’t have integrations with some of the software your prospects use? “The platform chosen by 4 out of 5 companies that use XXXX software” (that you do integrate with).
Your shortcomings could be the key to becoming the next Warby Parker. Of software.
This is a great example of how your PR messaging strategy works in tandem with your website messaging. They didn’t crap all over Luxottica on their website - they used PR for that. But the two worked together. It’s rare to see that strategy in action.
Warby Parker also doesn’t get credit for their messaging discipline, which is not the same as having a great message. You can have a great message, but unless you’re sticking to it - and let’s be honest, many (most? all?) of us have worked for founders who are wild stallions (not in a good way) when it comes to messaging discipline. Since most Gobbledy readers are in the marketing world, I guess I’m saying - even when your messaging work is brilliant, the person you work for is probably going to screw it up anyway.