PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Now that we are ‘officially’ in a recession, the realization of which typically means that we are in the middle of or on our way out of one, we’re seeing a curious trend here at the agency. Companies that we’ve never talked to, companies we haven’t heard from in years, and companies we’ve never heard of, period – are asking us to help them choose a position. It might be a new position or it might be an updated position to suit these less-forgiving times.

In some cases these companies have their business strategy set but no story with aspiration or vision that sits above the strategy and unites every business unit. As a result they can’t get the right valuation from analysts or they’re stuck in the wrong competitive set. In other cases the company has chosen a position and is interested in a gut-check, hiring us on a consultative basis first. (These ‘trial-size’ contracts are a classic sign of an economic downturn.)

In other situations the company’s markets are consolidating by the minute, driven by the entrance of a behemoth competitor (on Mondays and Wednesdays insert “Google,” on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays insert “Microsoft”) and they need an irrefutable statement of why choosing best-of-breed still matters over giving in to the inevitable one-stop shop.

In still others, the company is growing too quickly to come up with a new position that works for the next stage of growth, realizing that if they don’t, they’ll put the brakes on that growth because they just don’t pass the smell test of the CXO customer versus the regional VP they’ve sold to successfully in the past.

I’ve wondered this week whether these urges to position move in cycles, like the stock market, and that we are just in the midst of another surge in positioning anxiety to suit a leaner economic profile.

On a more “it’s something in the water” note, there’s also the election. In case you’ve been cyrogenically frozen since 2006, it’s hard to watch two minutes of a news program and avoid seeing the very real implications of how a single phrase dropped at the end of a thousandth church supper can be blown up, distorted, cleaved out of context and heralded in the next half-hour’s headlines as a definitive statement of position. (One rogue sales rep with his own deck in Tokyo can do a lot of damage as well.) When everyone in the country is preparing to choose, having the right position suddenly matters more, especially when our 24 x 7 news cycles can distort two relatively similar positions to the point where what should be a rational choice is suddenly one between, to quote Dave Barry, “ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks” and “godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving leftwing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts.”

Or to get at what Dave Barry was really intending to say, do you want to sell a software package or a business process platform?

In the end, I think it’s a reflection of who we are as an agency as much as anything else. We’re not an Ogilvy & Mather, who can put 2,000 people on a single account and run a huge marketing machine. We’re not a mom-and-pop agency pouring our heart and soul into winning the billboard campaign for the local newspaper. We’re a mid-size agency of business marketing specialists serving health science and technology companies who are nearly always on the verge. You see it in their eyes when they talk to you, and hear the strain in their voices on the Polycom. They are impatiently striving for the next surge of growth, looking to get pass the phalanx of executive assistants into the C suite and be seen as a partner rather than a purveyor of a niche application they were founded on 15 years ago.

It’s a classic capitalist play, and one we enjoy every time. It’s a process that pushes you to be clear, something that can be very hard to do when you’re in the midst of a lot of complexity. In an update to Joan Didion’s classic line “We tell each other stories in order to live,” in business we have no choice but to tell our customers, analysts and prospects compelling, fresh stories in order to thrive.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 4:09 am and is filed under Branding, Corporate Identity, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.