What if the key to standing out wasn’t finding your niche… but attacking the norm?

In this provocative episode, we sit down with Todd Irwin, Chief Strategy Officer at Fazer and author of the new book De-Positioning (Amazon), to challenge the status quo of brand strategy.

Drawing on decades of experience with both global giants and venture-backed startups, Todd reveals why traditional positioning frameworks are falling short—and how De-Positioning flips the script.

You’ll learn:

• Why most brand positioning fails to drive real impact
• How to win by challenging category conventions
• What CMOs and founders get wrong about brand-growth alignment
• How to put De-Positioning into practice in your own brand today
• Whether you’re a strategist, creative, or founder, this episode will give you a sharp new lens to rethink how your  brand competes.

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Transcript

I think the problem is that agencies are focused too much on differentiation and creativity. Remember, customers care the most about you solving their problem. Yeah, there are times maybe when you want a different this or a different that, right? But it’s proven. The psychology of consumers, the first thing that they’re looking for, the first thing they care about, solve the problem.

Hello and welcome to JUST Branding. The only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

All right.

Hello and welcome back to JUST Branding. Today’s guest is someone who’s been challenging the way we think about brand positioning. Todd Irwin is the Chief Strategy Officer of Fazer, an award-winning brand strategy firm and the author of the brand new book, De-Positioning, a bold reframe on traditional positioning theory. With decades of experience leading strategy at global agencies and scaling startups backed by heavy-hitting VCs like Google Ventures, Todd’s insights are rooted in both big brand and scrappy challenger realities. And in this episode, we’re going to discuss that. We’re going to discuss why traditional positioning frameworks are failing modern brands, how de-positioning gives you an edge by attacking category norms, and the practical steps you can take will see most and founders can take to align brand with business impact. So we’re going to get into it. Welcome to the show, Todd.

Nice to meet you guys. Yeah. Super excited. Yeah.

Let’s do this. We’re not going to waste any time. It’s a big topic.

It’s a big topic. Yeah. And I must say, I love the podcast and I’m especially honored. Just was listening to the Marty Neumeier episode and, yeah, his book is a Bible. Yeah, he’s great. Amazing. Amazing.

Yes, he is. Yes. And yours, obviously, you were just talking off air and your book is sent around all the world presently. So it’s pretty exciting. It’s your first book, right?

First book. Yeah, we’re launching or it’s coming out in Europe in September in the States, late October, early November, India, South Korea, Brazil, all over the place.

That’s awesome. Well, let’s get into it because there’s a lot to unpack it, right? So rethinking brand positioning and let’s just start off with the problem like of the status quo. So you said most brand positionings fall flat. Why is that the case?

Yeah, for decades, the gospel and marketing has been the same, so to speak. Find your white space, stand out, be different. I mean, you know the brand gap, right? There’s so much about differentiation. It’s a big part of that book. I think with differentiation is that everybody’s trying to do it. So you’ve got markets that are full of differentiators trying to differentiate against everybody else. It’s just, it’s repeated over and over again. Every MBA program, every agency pitch, every marketing book. And, you know, and here’s the thing. It’s like it used to work, but the markets we live in now have changed completely. White space is gone, right? It’s white spaces, gaps, you know, used to have, or should I say almost every agency does, is they look at the intersections between relevance and differentiation and they’re looking for, where’s the opportunity space? How do we find a way to carve ourselves our own niche in it? And everybody’s doing the same and all that white space is just gone. It’s just, and especially today with how fast the markets are moving, with new businesses popping up. So everything has changed completely. Those gaps are filled almost instantly. Any difference you create, any feature, any design, any message, like it’s, especially with AI, right? It gets copied in weeks, sometimes, you know, days, sometimes minutes, right? So if your competitive strategy is built on being different, and we say it’s kind of borrowed time, it’s just about, you know, somebody’s going to come around and steal it from you. The other thing is that customers don’t buy the quote-unquote different. And there’s a big part in the book where I talk about competitive advantage, and specifically the EBM model, which it’s not just EBM, but there’s a lot of models that just show like why customers buy and how they buy. And the first thing that they do is they find there’s a problem, right? And so it starts with I’ve got a problem, I got to solve it, right? The first step is not, am I looking for a different product? The first step is how do I solve my problem? Whether it’s I need a cup of coffee, whether it’s I need to hire a consultancy, right? That’s where the problems start. That’s where the buying journey starts. And that’s the real game, and that’s where de-positioning comes in. I talked to all my friends at all the big agencies, they’re still doing the same thing, they’re still trying to figure out, unique selling propositions, but it’s just not the way that people buy. And that’s not theory, right? That is statistical. So de-positioning at its heart is pain point solutioning. So instead of looking for a way to create a unique selling proposition, something that you own, something that’s different, it’s how do I solve the customer’s most pressing pain point? And own that solution, and do a better job at solving that customer problem. And in doing that, if you solve that customer, we call it a hero customer pain point. If you solve that hero customer pain point better than all your competitors, what you do is you de-position them. You de-position them in the market. It’s exactly what Apple does, right? It’s really, you know, I would, I’ve been saying for a while now, you know, Steve Jobs, the line think different, right? It was, it’s really think better, right? It was, it’s a slick line. It’s probably the most famous tagline ever. But at the end of the day, he wasn’t thinking about how to differentiate from the Sony Walkman or from the IBM computer. He was saying, how do I make a better computer? How do I make a better Walkman? How do I make a better BlackBerry when he made the smartphone? It’s really about better, so that’s De-Positioning.

We’re talking a little bit about the classic differentiation versus distinctive debate, which rattles on quite a bit. What I’m hearing here, Todd, is, listen, it’s about being distinctive in the space, not trying to do anything completely wild or completely different in the category, solving the customer’s problem and becoming famous for that. Is that what we’re talking about?

It’s about being a pain point solver, right? It’s about solving. And also, one thing that really bugs me is, branding agencies, they get a bad rap, right? CMOs are getting kicked out of the boardrooms. Gallaby talks about this all the time, right? They’re losing their relevance, right? Why is that? It’s because they can’t prove the return on investment of marketing. Bottom line. I mean, and marketing agencies have been trying to prove this stuff. I mean, I’ve been doing this stuff for three decades now. I remember at the beginning of my career, I’m seeing brochures from Ogilvy saying, here’s the ROI in marketing, right? I mean, it’s just been, it’s endless, endless, endless. The issue is that, you know, we’re focused on being different. We’re focused on being creative, right? Look at CAN, right? It’s all about, who’s the most creative agency out there? CEOs are skeptical. The C-suite, besides the CMO, they’re skeptical because they have a hard time calculating the ROI in branding and marketing. And so, chief financial officer, CFOs, they see it as a cost, right? They don’t see it as an investment, right? But at the end of the day, like, what do people do? People buy brand, right? You fall in love with brands. You fall in love with Nike or Mercedes or Apple or whoever, right? I mean, we don’t just love brands because we’re in the branding business, the three of us. Customers, people love brands. They attach themselves to a brand. And for some reason, the C-suite is not getting it. And I’m on a mission to fix that. I really want to fix that.

Todd, I’ve got a big question for you, right? Let me just pick you apart, if I may. And I’m just completely hijacking all Jacob’s questions.

Yeah, it’s all good. It’s all good.

But, you know, listeners get used to me. I’m sorry, everybody. But I’ve got to ask this, right, before Jacob comes in, because you mentioned two things there, as I saw it. There was the ROI problem, which is really a big challenge, but also this idea of being a customer problem solver. So how does being the customer problem solver help marketeers with the ROI challenge that they have? How does that connect?

Yeah, I mean, I think the problem is, is that agencies are focused too much on differentiation and creativity, like I just mentioned, and they need to be briefed differently. It’s not that, you know, people, some people say to me, well, what does that mean? The creatives go away or creative becomes less important? No, creative actually becomes more important, but it’s the way that you brief the creative teams, right? It’s the way you, and this goes back to Trout and Reeves, right? The original positioning book, right? Own one singular big idea, that’s one of the principles, right? But if you’re owning the wrong idea, you’re steering the ship, right? The wrong way, bottom line. And so remember, customers care the most about you solving their problem, right? Yeah, there are times maybe when you want a different this or a different that, right? But it’s proven. The psychology of consumers, the first thing that they’re looking for, the first thing they care about, solve the problem, right? And it’s not just Apple. I mean, look at Uber. They solved the market problem, and it worked. They’ve dominated. And we say that too, it’s like stop focusing on differentiation, focus on dominance. Yeah. How do you dominate? Solve the problem.

Thanks, Todd. So what we’re kind of alluding to here is like bridging the gap between brand and business. So like actually making the strategy matter. So let’s say you have found that customer problem and you have, I guess, an idea of what the strategy is going to be. How do you actually get that to the CMO, to the CEOs, make it actually happen?

Yeah, it’s tough. You know, the skepticism out there is real. It depends, too, on, you know, who we’re working for. You know, every company has a different personality. You’ve got some companies where you’ve got real skepticism at the C-suite. You’ve got other companies where you’ve got CEOs that they have some real knowledge and they really get brand. You don’t know what room you’re walking in when you walk into it, so. But even I think that when you have CEOs who are seasoned, they’ve been around the block and they, you know, they’ve worked with agencies here and there. They’ve done the branding thing here and there. They have some semblance of sort of, you know, getting it. But it’s education. You’ve got to educate the C-suite. We run workshops for, I run an agency called Fazer. We’re a brand strategy firm. We do a lot of C-suite consulting, running workshops for not just executive marketers, but also for the C-suite to try to educate them on. You’d be surprised. We work for global brands, Fortune 500 companies. We’ve got a CEO that still thinks that a brand is a logo and a tagline. And I’m like, really? You’ve got a thousand stores. You’re in every region on the globe. And you’re still like, you’re still saying that? It’s unbelievable. And it shows you the level of education at the C-suite, which needs to change, really needs to change. And agencies, it’s their responsibility to do that, especially branding agencies.

How are you doing this? So you’re working with them quite often. So how do you bring sceptical execs on board with your brand work or strategic brand work?

Yeah, you really have to show them the research, how people buy things. And we show them different models, buying journeys. We analyze their customers, their markets. We look at what are the pain points that their customers have? What are the weaknesses that their competitors have? And everybody, even if they’re trying to differentiate, they’re also trying to solve problems, too, for customers, right? They don’t completely not get pain point solutioning. It’s more about prioritization. But we take them through workshops where we uncover really these two things, customer pain points and competitor weaknesses. And that’s the intersection that we look for.

Do you mind if we tuck into that a little bit further? Like how you actually go about this in a workshop? Like how do you uncover these pain points? Or like how are you presenting? I guess you’re not uncovering them in a workshop, or are you? Are you coming in with your research?

No, you’re doing both. Nobody knows the customer like the CEO, CMO and the C-suite. I mean, you got smart people who are analyzing the market all the time. So, workshopping, interviews. And we also take it out onto the street, do focus groups, ask customers questions, see what really is relevant to them. You know, the thing about de-positioning is that we call it ultra-relevance, right? When you can own the solution to that one burning thing that the customer is looking for. And I always go back to Apple, which might sound cliche, but I think most agencies when they’re looking at Apple, or most companies when they’re thinking about Apple, they’re thinking about different, sexy, right? Easy to use, but it’s really about, it’s about the problem that they solve. Even now, I mean, if you look at, I mean, Tim Cook took over, however many years ago, and they, you know, he repositioned the brand around privacy. Why? Because it was a major pain point in the market, right? Which was transparency of data, everybody’s afraid, and they’re still, they’re still positioned around privacy. He’s taken Jobs’ theories and philosophies on marketing and ran with it. You know, he hasn’t deviated at all. Does that answer your question?

A little bit. The big point here is just like about the customer and just the through line between all of this. But you mentioned before about the ROI and sharing that with the CEOs and everything. So like, how does that actually show up in, you know, performance or ops or anything like that? Like, how are you getting?

Yeah, I mean, listen, we talk about this. So return on investment. How do you calculate return on investment? It’s hard and it’s hard because really what drives sales is one whole integrated company, right? So it’s not just marketing that drives sales. It’s not just the sales teams that drive sales. It’s not just the product. It’s everything put together. One of the principles that I speak about in the book is integration, right? Integration wins. Again, I’ll go back to Apple. Sorry about that. But if you look at how they integrated usability or user experience into the company, they positioned the brand at the beginning around usability, and it was integrated from the very top to the very bottom of the company. And the same thing with privacy, right? It’s integrated from the top to the bottom. So, integration is the key to making it work. It goes back to what I was saying earlier, which is that the C-suite, you know, so many times, still sees branding as a logo and a tagline, right? Which is just surface.

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Why do we think that is, right, still, after all these years? Is it because that’s the sort of the end, I guess the tangible stuff that people can get their arms around? Because like we’ve been talking about this for like 10, 20 years, right?

Like 30.

How is this still something which people kind of just can’t get their heads around? The brand is way beyond the mark, right? The symbol. It’s beyond that. It’s what it means to people. Like, why are we still having this conversation? It just drives me nuts.

Yes, I know. That’s why I want to change it. Exactly. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Why do you think it is?

Well, I think it must be my personal view is it must be because that is what people see, right? I don’t know. It’s just something in the human brain that goes, oh, the Nike tick or the Nike tick, depending on which side of the pond you’re from. That’s the brand because that’s the bit that they see. And for my mind, it kind of goes back to the origins of branding, right? Which is like where cattle were seared with a hot iron, right? To signify who they belong to. But, you know, if you… And so you say, oh, the brand is the hot iron that puts that on. But it kind of is way more than that because even then, when you think about it, it was the symbol. It meant something beyond the actual iron. It meant that that animal belonged to you, Todd, or to you, Jacob, or to me, Matt. So it was always beyond the market itself. And I do think it’s the most peculiar thing, because if you literally sit down with someone, and I love to say this to someone and say, right, you want an amazing, powerful brand in the market, right? Do you think that’s going to come about because of the logo? Right? Seriously, right? Are we going to spend all our time and attention on the world’s greatest brands? Do they all have the world’s greatest logos? I think not. Like, you know, it’s beyond that. But for some reason, people can’t get their heads around it. What are your thoughts, Todd? You got any thoughts? Why is it that we’re still having this conversation?

I have a lot of thoughts on this. Well, first of all, I mean, where branding came from, right? The word brand, right? People think of branding a cow, right? So it’s just an icon on the back of a cow, right? And then it turned into, if you look at the history of brand, and back to the Greek and the Roman empires, and how the businesses that were started and identification. That’s why we call it brand identity, right? But organizations today are so damn complex. The one I was talking about before, right? Where the C-suite, the CEO still thinks the brand is a logo and a tagline. But his organization is so complex for everybody to get the same sort of understanding or feeling about the brand, right? It has to integrate and that’s taking something, a story and communicating something that should be very simple and should have one singular identity across a world with different languages, right? In different verticals, with different types of products, right? It’s a complex task to get it right. The complexity of it is not the same just because of modern day businesses and how complex they are. Even startups today, a lot of the work that we do in Palo Alto technology companies, these companies start out really complex, right? With the type of technologies that they’re building. They start out with CEOs and founders and technology officers and marketers and this and that, and they’re all trying to tell a story and figure it out. It’s the complexity today, and it’s just getting more complex and AI is making it, you know, I don’t want to use the word worse, but…

So your theory then, if I’ve got you right, is that because it’s so complex, we like to simplify things. CEOs are no different to anyone else, they’re human after all and C-suite. They simplify, they boil it down to the most obvious thing and that’s why it kind of comes out like this, you know, like when they’re talking and what they’re thinking and what they’re saying. That seems to make sense to me, it’s quite plausible.

I think that education is a problem too, that’s why I was mentioning before about wanting to educate the C-suite. I think, you know, you have to either, they’re not paying attention in marketing 101 or they just don’t care. There’s something in the culture that needs to be changed and the only way to do that is through education and propaganda, right? How do agencies take back the conversation, right? Agencies are struggling right now. AI is causing mergers, people getting fired, skepticism is everywhere. Agency churn rate is so high. Agencies need to take back the conversation. We need to do a better job communicating what we do. Again, people buy brand. They do. They just do. You align yourself with a certain type of style or car. It might not be the highest rated, but you like it, right? You might like a certain fashion brand. Maybe that sweater really doesn’t look good on you, but you bought into it, the brand, and so you buy it anyway, right? People buy brand. CMOs know it. Us marketers know it. Us branders know it.

Let’s take it into practical terms like bridging this gap between theory to practice. For someone starting out, what would you recommend if they’re starting a new brand or maybe repositioning? Where should they start?

So are we talking about early stage founders?

Yeah, founders and brand builders. Yeah, both of them.

You know, again, it goes back to education. You guys had Marty Neumeyer on. You know, I love, you know, when we were working with founders, we would buy them Marty’s book and send it to them. Say, hey, please do us a favor. Like, you know, some of these founders come in the room like, oh, you know, we don’t know marketing, right? We don’t know the brand. Teach us, right? We send them Marty’s book. It’s a great book. Just to get a sense of where it all comes from. And then again, it’s the same answer, Jacob. It’s education, workshopping and teaching your clients. It’s critical, really, really critical.

Do you think there’s any mindset shifts that they need to get over or need to think about de-positioning well?

I think the big mindset shift is this belief in differentiation, that differentiation is going to help you sell more products. I mean, that’s the one that’s the reason I wrote the book. And it makes me think of a story of why I wrote the book. You guys don’t mind if I tell you a story, right?

Yes, that’s good.

So, we were working on a… I’m not going to name names. We were working on a Fortune 500 brand doing a global brand strategy. It was a long project. We worked next to one of the big consultancies, big business consultancies. And the team at the business consultancy we got very, very close to is they were doing all the business strategy. They had analyzed the market for a few years. They had a really great idea on how this company can move from what they were known for for years and move up into, it was specifically to a technology company. And the group at that firm, all MBAs, PhDs and MBAs, business, they would always tease us. Oh, you branding guys, you’re going to ruin our strategy. We’re going to give them a playbook and you’re going to take it, you’re going to fluff it up and destroy it and create all that differentiating fluffy art school stuff. And I’m from New York, right? I mean, you know, seventh generation, I’m not going to take shit from you. So we would like go out to dinner, we would drink and we would, you know, debate. I just, you know, you guys are a bunch of business, whatever. You know, you don’t know anything about how to like create brand. You don’t even think about art. You don’t know anything about writing, right? Great, we’ll take your playbook, go away, all that kind of stuff. And we would get into it. It was fun, a lot of fun. And then one night out drinking, you know, I said to the guy who was the head of the team, I said, yeah, man, let’s get, let’s go to the office. Let’s whiteboard this. I like, I really want to understand what the hell you’re talking about. And we did, and we spent a day and we workshopped for a day. And he said, listen, it’s really simple. People don’t buy different, right? The whole reason that we get hired is to figure out how do you position a business in a sector? And the only way to do that is to solve the most important pain point that the market has, that the customer has. And that’s how we position businesses. And then you agencies take that, and then you take our playbook, you practically ignore it. And then you go and you look for gaps. Well, we already found the gaps. We found the gaps. Why are you going looking to find the gaps and we already found them? Just take what we came up with and figure out how to communicate it in the clearest way. Make it coherent, right? It was like, okay, that makes a lot of sense. So we shouldn’t be finding gaps and differentiating. We should be solving a hero pain point. It’s like, yes, exactly. I’m like, bam, epiphany, okay. So we started doing it and clients loved it. And that’s where de-positioning came from. That’s the de-positioning story. And it works. It really, really works. So the book’s coming out and we know we’re going to take this and we’re going to take it to the world. Hopefully, agencies catch on. I love my friends at all the big agencies, all the big branding agencies. They’re so talented, so wonderful. They’re wonderful people. We just need a little shift, you know? One of my strategy, my head of strategic excellence, this guy, Craig Bagnow, always says, it’s just a three degree shift. Just need a little bit of a three degree shift to change everything. I love that concept.

Thank you for sharing your origin story. Do you want to just share a little bit more about the book? Like, why did you write it now? Who’s it for? And anything else that you’ve learned from that experience, you know, authoring a book?

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s why I wrote it, was that it just wasn’t an article. It wasn’t just a series. You know, I had written a series on depositioning for Branding Mag back in 2022, 2023. And then a friend of mine read it, a friend of mine who works at a big agency read it. He’s like, man, he’s like, that’s something. He’s like, you’re on to something. He’s like, you need to write the book. So I was like, okay, I’m going to write the book. Who’s it for? I think it’s for everybody. I think it’s for business owners. I think it’s for agencies. I’d love to see some of the big agencies shift from looking at differentiation, which I think is dead, to looking at how to deposition, how to problem solve, focus on pain point solutioning. That’s the mission, and that’s why I wrote it.

And how has your perspective changed from agency life to being an author?

Oh, so I still run Fazer, F-A-Z-E-R. We’re about 25 people. We’re a boutique. We’re in New York and London, and we have some people in Boston. So I’m still Chief Strategy Officer, but the business pretty much runs really, really well. We’ve got some really smart people. So I don’t know if I’m going to completely go into authorhood, but I think there’s probably a second book, maybe in like two years. Yeah, something like that.

Awesome. Matt, did you have any follow up questions?

Yeah. Well, what’s beyond the de-positioning? You mentioned there could be some follow ups. I’m just super interested in what’s on your mind right now. Where do you see the need beyond this one?

Yeah, I think that we need to, as a sector, really look at why customers buy things. And so really digging deeper into some of the stuff that Byron Sharp is doing, I think is really interesting. He’s also a differentiation hater.

He is.

We had him on a few months ago.

Did you?

Yeah.

Oh, I want to listen to that. That’s great. Yeah. Oh, how was he?

Oh, yeah. Brutal. That’s how he was.

He’s brutal. Yeah, yeah.

But he’s an amazingly smart guy. And yeah, the work that they’re doing at Ehrenberg Bass, I think is so important, so influential. You know, it’s really flipping everything on its head, right? Him and Jenny, I can never say her name right. Help me out, Jacob.

Bromaniac, I think.

That’ll do. Yeah.

Romaniac, right? Something like that.

Yeah, Romaniac. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jenny’s amazing. We’ve had her on as well. And they’re just so smart, the things that they’re looking at. And what I love about their work, and I don’t know what you think, Todd, is that, and I think this alludes to something you were talking about at the start, is that when you come to educate clients, right? When you come to show them stuff, you need something academically rigorous, right? And that’s what they’re providing to the market. And it’s so helpful because otherwise it’s just, well, that’s what you think. And that’s what I think. And, you know, then you’re back to kind of just like, the, you know, you’re the picture people. It’s like, no, no, no, this has some real tangible scientific backing. And that’s really that rigor that I think we need to bring to the space.

Yeah, completely agreed. I think there’s something really interesting about Sharp’s work, specifically customer entry points, CEPs, and what drives them. I do think that the first book was really focused on direct-to-consumer. And you know, you guys, I’m sure you guys know, you know, big corporations use that book as their Bible now. You know, I think for companies, corporations like that, it makes a lot of sense, the whole concept of mental availability. On the B2B side, I think it’s relevant as well, but I think it’s a lot different. What I’m interested in is what drives those entry points, right? So is it, you know, or category entry points, I call them customer entry points, but they’re category entry points, right? But it’s really the same thing. What in the culture is driving people to make decisions, right? That they’re going to go buy things. What are the cultural shifts that happen, that create big groups of people to move toward one brand or the other? Is it advertising? Is it the news? Is it influencers? I’m not sure if it’s just availability and he’s very stuck on availability and he’s got a lot of data to back it up. I’m not saying he’s wrong, but I’m not sure that it’s the only thing. Because if you read some textbooks on competitive advantage and you look at the buying journey, problem recognition is the first step in every single book, every single psychology book, every single marketing book. And so I think it’s a combination of Ehrenberg-Bass and what they’re doing, and also a lot of the classic science around how customers or consumers make decisions. So I think there’s something there. I think at Fazer, we’re working on looking at cultures and how cultures drive consumers to do things. It’s not just availability, though. It plays a big part in it. We all know, and I love his theories on availability and the need to create as much awareness as possible.

Mental and physical availability.

Mental and physical, 1,000%. And that’s some of the stuff that needs to be taught to the C-suite.

As you mentioned, there’s often just, he’s spraying this one idea versus just like, only his way versus both ways or many other ways. I do get that vibe as well, but.

I totally appreciate what you were saying at the start of our conversation, but I want to be contrarian, just for a moment, just to see what your thoughts were. So I want to ask this question, throw this grenade in and see what happens. What do you think that there’s ever a time where a strategy should focus on differentiation? I totally get your point. For example, I do a lot of work in tech, right? And I 100% agree with you. Like, a company puts forward a new feature, you know, the competitors take it and run with it. So what made them different today in three weeks’ time, they’re no longer different. So, you know, the only other thing you’re left is kind of how to be distinctive in the space as opposed to different, right? And then create a moat around that. But other industries could do with a bit of a shake up. Like, let’s take, for example, I don’t know, hairdressing, right? You’re like, you know, on a typical high street, like he says, with hardly any hair.

That was a strange choice with too bald.

You know what I mean? I get my beer trip, right? Like what? Anyway, let’s take hairdressing, right? That is just to take sort of a commoditized sort of service based sector. You know, I’m pretty sure that there’s space where one hairdresser, if they’re facing heavy competition, can look for ways to stand out and be genuinely different, maybe in their experience, maybe in terms of their customer base, maybe in terms of the way that they do things. I don’t know, it just seems to me that maybe, you know, there are times when, you know, almost like that might be a thing. I mean, I think the ideal is to have both personally, like a good strategy should try and find both in my view. But I’d love to get your thoughts on that. Like, you know, is there ever a time when it is a good idea for a brand to look at being different?

I think there probably are some businesses like that where, you know, being different makes a difference. It rarely comes across our table. What I would say is that being different just for the sake of being different is what we’re talking about. The, you know, I wrote an article last year called the, I think it was called like the Path to Differentiation is Not What You Think, because if you really want to be different, solve it better, right? Apple is known for being different, but at the end of the day, different wasn’t the thing that they were trying to do, right? Everybody thought they were different, but what they were trying to do is solve, so the pathway to differentiation is through pain point solutioning. If you really, so a better haircut, okay, is really what you’re looking for, right? Right.

Okay. I’m with you.

Yeah.

Hair is what I’m looking for.

I think it’s differentiation, it’s differentiation for the sake of it. I mean, I don’t want to name names on agencies that I’ve worked with over the years and all the bigs or whatever, but they really do look for gaps and they look for the unique selling proposition. What’s our unique selling proposition? Why are we different? Well, does the customer really care? No, I want a better haircut. I want a better burger. I want to hire a better service provider, right? Because I need my solution. I need my solution. I need a better polo shirt, whatever it is, right? That’s how customers think.

But better in the terms of is going to be different for each person, right? Like the value, the relevance is different. So the understanding of better, it can change, right?

Well, I mean, when you look at big companies, does it change from person to person? Does personal tastes really matter that much? Yes, I guess so. I guess so.

Because what’s somewhat like person A to person B, something would have a different idea of what’s better, better for them. Your thoughts?

Unpacking what’s better, you know, when you’re talking about, I think I would have to ask you, like, what type of business are you talking about? Where you have…

Well, let’s run with the hairdressers, Ryan. Like, the better haircut, let’s say you’re a goth. I’m just pulling this out of there. Like you’re a goth versus a business, right? There’s better, it’s different in different ways. Like you’d go to a black store where it’s like a different vibe, totally maybe it’s neon lit or has like punk music versus something else. That’s better, right?

Yeah. Listen, I think you’re talking about you’re getting into personal tastes and how do you segment tastes within a sector, right? Of people looking for haircuts, right? And you’ve got… So you look at who are we going to cut hair for? Are we about Matt and myself, right? Are we a buzz cut shop? And what are the people like Matt and myself looking for? Or are we a more classic hair cutter? And how do we do a better job doing that? Style plays into it without a doubt. Style is important. I mean, I think… What was the agency? JKR did that distinctiveness study recently. Did you guys see that? Yes. They’re leaning into distinctiveness. I wonder… I don’t know anybody over there, but I thought it was a really interesting study. When they published it, and I can’t remember if it was like last year or the year before, and they did it with some big data company, I felt to me like they had read Sharp’s book, and he talks about how important it is to be distinct, so people can identify you. And it’s like, okay, I know they used to talk about differentiation, so now they’re shifting to distinctiveness. Is it because Sharp is telling them that it’s more about distinction than it is about differentiation? We’re getting to the little nuances, how to position, how to tell a brand story, and how to create relevance with people. It’s complicated, James.

It is complicated, yeah. Well, we’re kind of coming full circle, but through Lime, it’s the customer and the pain points and really trying to understand that to stand out. All right. Are you ready for some quick fire questions before we wrap up, Todd?

Yeah, sure. I hope I’m quick enough. I got to take a sip of my coffee. Go ahead.

All right. What’s one brand you think nails their de-position? I can’t say Apple. We’ve talked about Apple.

Yeah.

That’s definitely not Blockbuster either. I mean, I think Uber. Uber’s de-positioned the whole market. Yeah. So I think they completely, completely nail it. Next question.

What is the most overrated buzzword in branding right now?

Oh, God. Buzzwords and branding. I never even think about that. I mean, you want to give me a list of buzzwords and I’ll tell you which one. Vibing, vibe branding. Have you heard about vibe branding? I heard about that one the other day where people are talking to ChatGPT to come up with brand strategies. You can talk to it, right? That kind of thing. I’ve heard about vibe branding.

I’ve not heard that one. All right.

Now you have.

Now we have. All right. A book or a pod or someone that’s recently influenced your work.

I got a book on Rashad Tabakawala’s podcast. I’m going to be on next month, I think or the month after. I’ve been listening to his podcasts and he’s got some really, really smart people on there. I love his whole concept of identifying the turd on the table. Do you know about this? No, I haven’t. Big corporations, nobody wants to say that there’s a turd on the table. Everybody wants to talk about it as a brownie, but it’s actually a turd. It’s the leaders who have enough… I know, right? You should get Rashad on, he’s great. It’s the leaders who have enough intelligence and guts to say, you know what? We’re not going to ignore this. That are successful, yeah. I love Rashad, I can’t wait to be on the show. Thank you.

All right, next question. One actionable takeaway for listeners wanting to reframe their positioning today?

Yeah, easy. Focus on pain point solutioning, not differentiation. Differentiation is dead.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Todd. Is there any final words we have before we wrap up?

Plug the book maybe, plug the agency. Is that cool with you guys?

Yes, that’s right.

Plug away. All right, the book is called De-Positioning, the secret brand strategy for creating competitive advantage. It’s going to be on all the platforms, Amazon, et cetera, et cetera. Our agency is called Fazer, F-A-Z-E-R, we’re at Fazer.agency. I love this podcast. You guys are awesome. I really appreciate you having me on. Thanks, guys.

Todd, it’s been amazing. Thanks so much for carving out some time and sharing some thoughts, and shaking things up. We appreciate it and love a good non-conformist. So yeah, you’re always welcome.

Great. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Jacob. All right. Cheers.

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