We celebrate a legend of positioning
And I don't really care what the readers want, I'm talking about Winger again
Hello Gobbledeers,
I’m really torn.
I can’t decide if I now hold Gobbledy readers in even higher esteem, or if I’m incredibly disappointed in nearly all of you. It may be a little of both.
After last week’s column about ChatGPT in which I referred roughly 312 times to hair metal legend Kip Winger (of the band Winger, natch), I received messages from a not-small number of readers that all said something like this:
“I have no idea who Kip Winger is. Or what Winger is. Or why you kept talking about Winger.”
Huh.
This was a surprising bit of feedback. Feedback that made me feel:
a) approximately 14,000 years old; and
b) unaware of the musical tastes of the readers of this thing.
So, for those who don’t know (and I recognize that the “those who don’t know” group 100% overlaps with the “those who don’t care” group), this is a photo of the band Winger:
(Editor’s Note: They do not currently look like that.)
The oddest part of this is that I never had a hair metal phase. I never cared at all about Winger or Ratt or Queensryche or Poison. Except their song “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” which is great. Er, “great.” Sure, when we drove through Chicago we listened to 103.5 The Blaze. And sang along. But I mean it was 1991, c’mon!
Anyway, my apologies to everyone for taking up 2,000 words on Kip Winger (except to reader Russ S. who was the only one who appreciated it. You’re on the Nice List.)
In memory of one of the great ad men
Last month George Lois, arguably the greatest advertising art director of our time, died at 91, leaving behind an incredible legacy that - for all of us in the Marketing Storytelling Industrial Complex (tm) - is still incredibly relevant today. (You can see some of his work here.)
Lois served as an art director for countless ads, including being responsible for the “I want my MTV” campaign that helped resuscitate a financially struggling cable music startup. He was hired to revive Esquire Magazine’s covers in the 1960s, producing works like this one:
The NY Times obit mentions this anecdote:
In 1962, Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquire, asked Mr. Lois how to improve the magazine’s covers, which were then conceived and assigned by an editorial committee. [Lois responded:] “You need to get one guy who understands the culture, who likes comic strips, goes to the ballet, visits the Metropolitan Museum.”
Great marketing requires vision - often the vision of a single person. We don’t see much of this today.
But I’m mostly mentioning Lois because of one ad he created that is a miraculous, genius-level bit of positioning.
Back in my days at Tommy Hilfiger, an ad Lois created during Hilfiger’s first year in 1985 was often evoked as a milestone for the brand, essentially launching Hilfiger’s career by sticking a billboard in Times Square and promoting a tiny store he had on the Upper West Side. None of that quite made sense to me, but I was missing the main point, which I’ll share after the ad:
The copy is a hard to read, but the last lines are “Tommy’s clothes are easy-going without being too casual, classic without being predictable. He calls them classics with a twist. The other three designers call them competition.”
We’ve talked about positioning here quite a bit, in large part because I think that very, very few software companies take it seriously (and even when they do, they’re not really sure what to do with it…how do you take that annoying multi-day exercise where you argued about the word “enterprise” for 3 hours and turn it into anything?).
This ad accomplishes everything you could possibly want from great positioning, and it does it explicitly. And - better yet - it’s clever while still accomplishing what it set out to do - position Hilfiger in the market.
When you’re a new brand, it’s not clear to buyers who you’re like. One way to address this is what we’ve seen startup-y clothing brands: they open stores in areas where other startup-y brands aimed at 28 year olds are also opening (Georgetown, Venice Beach, Newbury Street).
Lois went at it this problem head-on — Hilfiger is the 4th great American menswear designer, the newest of a group that includes Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Perry Ellis. We are like those companies in that we are led by a great designer, but we are unlike them in that we don’t take ourselves too seriously.
Yes, this ad was partly aimed at the general public, but it was definitely aimed at department store buyers who needed to figure out if Hilfiger fit into their assortment, and on which floor the apparel needed to sit. The ad make that explicitly clear.
Software companies will try to do this by talking about the category they’re in (“we’re an AI-powered marketing automation platform” etc). But that’s the category they’re in. That’s not who the competition is (you might address that with something like, “we’re like Mailchimp, only we also XXXX”).
Or for all those annoying startups who say “we have no competitors” you would say, “we’re like taking orders with a pencil, only you never lose the piece of paper.” (or whatever). Competitors are a shorthand for what you are. Being explicit about your competitors makes it easy for your buyers to understand you quickly.
On the other hand…
As noted, one of the reasons why positioning matters is so you can have clarity and consistency of messaging across your marketing channels. One of those marketing channels can be PR, which is often treated as a Press Release Dumping Ground (tm) rather than as a place to reinforce your position through earned articles.
I wanted to share this example of what happens when you use gobbledy instead of clear positioning in your press strategy.
Email personalization company Movable Ink was able to get this piece placed in Venturebeat that talks about some stuff their client Lands End is doing with email. A hearty mazel tov to Movable for getting the coverage.
They then use that coverage to lay down this clunker:
With Movable Ink, brands can scale omnichannel personalization and automatically transform data into hypertailored insights, said [CEO Vivek] Sharma. This integrates across customer touchpoints, and content easily connects to all relevant data wherever it is, and updates based on a customer’s recent interactions. This is all autogenerated by the platform...
The [prediction] model is based on an “exciting area” of mathematics known as hyperbolic geometry, he explained.
Whereas many retail AI tools rely on predictive models and/or propensity models to forecast customer behavior, hyperbolic geometry enables Movable Ink to map customer behavior, product catalog and content performance in a three-dimensional geometry. This visibility provides important insights for marketers and creative teams, said Sharma.
So if I’m understanding this correctly, marketers (most of whom don’t know - and I apologize here for several reasons - jack crap about the differences in modeling methods) are being told that Movable Ink is better than the competition because hyperbolic geometry (rather than those stupid predictive and/or propensity models) allows this company to create a three-dimensional geometry (?) that will provide my junior designer some insights.
In an early issue of Gobbledy I talked about how Warby Parker had a brilliant strategy to use PR to position the company against the 500 pound gorilla of glasses, Luxottica. Every bit of press featured one of the founders mentioning how Luxottica sold glasses for $500, while Warby sold equally great glasses for $95. That was the PR strategy - make people think that Warby sold Luxottica-level glasses for 80% less.
What was the PR strategy here? To show how Lands End does some cool stuff with Movable Ink, but then focus on incomprehensible-to-non-data-scientist differences in how their models were built?
That’s some silliness.
It’s really some silliness because Movable actually HAS a differentiated product - you ever get an email and there’s a live countdown clock in it? That’s them. Their messaging should be something like: “It’s like email, only relevant.”
Hyperbolic geometry, my ass.
It is not lost on me that my marketing strategy for my consulting business appears to be, “Crap all over a company, then hope they’ll hire me.” Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense. So I hope Movable Ink doesn’t hire me. I was always terrible at geometry anyway. (Marketing strategy #2: telling people they can’t have something makes them want it more.)
Thanks as always for reading - I know you have other stuff to read, and you could’ve read that instead. I’m glad you didn’t. That other thing was boring.
I think I can say with definition that anyone who doesn't know who Winger is/was doesn't deserve to read our column....what's that now?
There is ALWAYS competition, including the most formidable one, "do nothing."