Depositioning, with Todd Irwin

Positioning is an element that's so foundational to marketing. It's taught in every introductory class. Alongside the four P's of marketing, positioning is meant to describe the choices a brand makes to maximize how the market sees it. Positioning is very powerful because it can set perceptions that drive customer loyalty.

Strong demand and the willingness to pay a premium. But if all this is true, then why is the landscape littered? With examples of where brands flopped? We don't have to look far for these fails.

Take Microsoft Zune because how people thought of MP three players had already been set by Apple. Take Colgate frozen entrees. Sure both food and toothpaste go in our mouths, but TV dinner brands don't wanna leave you with a thought of toothpaste in your head. Harley Davidson's legendary cologne.

People buy a fragrance for the impression they want to leave, not something that evokes burnt rubber and gasoline. Cosmopolitan yogurt. There are plenty of brands in the dairy aisle. People didn't think a fashion brand belonged there.

FritoLay Lemonade Marketing a salty snack, and chasing it with a beverage strikes people as cynical and a cash grab. Hey Glennn here. Welcome to Funnel Reboot the show for data-based marketers. The reason these brands flopped is they try positioning themselves on a competitor's turf.

The correct way to position yourself is to start with the customer's need and work outward from there. To do this right, we've gotta flip the traditional concept on its head. Instead of positioning, the author we'll talk to today says we must deposition ourselves. He's the founder and chief strategy officer of brand strategy firm Fazer.

Over three decades, he's led strategy for Fortune 500 companies and venture-backed disruptors. He's been featured in the New York Times, Forbes and MIT Technology Review. Let's go now to New York City to speak with Todd Irwin. Todd Irwin, welcome to the final reboot, gw.

Hey, great to be here. Thanks for the invite. I'm very glad to give it. Todd, you wrote a book.

What's the name of the book? The book is called Depositioning and it's the secret brand strategy for Creating Competitive Advantage. See, I have it memorized. That's amazing.

That's great. All that looking in the mirror paid off. So Todd, The way that people have been brought up to think about positioning. Most, at least my experience is you've been handed, some kooky template and it sounds very much like positioning is something that you just force into existence by saying, our company is this and we do that, and we are supposed to be at this end of the market and customers are supposed to think these things about us.

Depositioning sounds like something different. What's the difference? I think if you spend enough time, in the brand strategy world, you see the same patterns. I've been doing this for over three decades, working with Fortune five hundreds, Coca-Cola, Verizon, Walmart, luxury Brands, you've sat across the table from big VC back.

Founders in their first year, were trying to get that first real foothold different size companies, different industries, different budgets, but they all the same core challenge. They need to compete, they need to and markets today are really brutal, more crowded, more and forgiving, and every single year just gets worse and worse. And I've been in rooms where a brand wins the market. Rooms where a brand is like losing for so many different reasons.

And what I've learned, The difference between the two is never luck. It's never just the budget, it's not even the creative, it's always the strategy. And it's the strategy that they deploy that gets the win. So that's really what pushed me to write the book.

Depositioning, I wanted to take everything I've learned from those wins and losses I wanted to take, everything I've learned from, the wins, the losses, high stakes client work, and behind the scenes and competitive battles, to put it into something practical. For CEOs, CMOs, founders, not just to read, not just a nod, but here's the reality, markets aren't slowing down to give us space to figure it out. Competitors aren't holding back. The shelf life of a competitive advantage is shrinking.

You might have an edge today, but tomorrow, the markets are so hyper competitive like somebody else is working right now to take it. that means the way we think about brand strategy has to change, Incremental way, not in a sort of tweak the tagline way, like in a fundamental way. I wrote this book, depositioning to give, marketing, executives, marketing leaders, a way to compete at a really high level, to see the field differently, to understand what the most, competitive brands in the world have been doing often without even naming it, that allows them to build an advantage and keep it, if you've ever felt like you're doing the work, investing money, creating campaigns, but still getting beaten like Depositioning is for you, it's not theory.

It's built on, buying science. It's not marketing fluff. It's built for real world competitive advantage. It comes from books like Michael Porter's competitive advantage.

The thing that's different about Depositioning is that. It aligns with what the big consultancies do, like the Deloittes and the McKinseys of the world, where they position businesses around solving pain points. So the whole thing with Depositioning is you look to what are the customer pain points, right? And how do you solve all of 'em?

And then in positioning, you wanna own a singular idea. So you try to find what is the most important customer pain point and position the brand around the solution, and by doing that you will deposition. Your competitors. That's the essence of it.

Yeah. And what most agencies do is they focus on being different, unique selling proposition, the USP, how do we be unique, right? How can we find the intersection between differentiation and creativity and find a gap in the market? There are no gaps left.

Gaps are gone. Yeah. People are propping businesses up today in an hour. It's so easy to do.

There's so much clutter. Yeah, it's all about hype being, being as competitive as possible. Yeah. I love that mindset.

And just, you said, in the book you said, don't look for white space. And I think we've been, habituated to thinking, oh, this is a game where we're supposed to like, try and find, an empty spot on a board. Like it's a board game. Yeah.

No, it's nothing like that. And when you alluded to the, management consultancies. We're not trying to turn marketers into those people, but what you meant was we're supposed to follow what they have been doing when they do strategy work, which is focusing on the problem, and they're very good at identifying that. And then how is the rest of what you do?

How does that form a solution to that problem? Yeah, it's a different way some people hear this and they're like what does that mean that creativity isn't as important? No, the creativity is actually more important, but it's how you brief the creatives. Okay.

And so what's happened is at all these big agencies. They're run by creatives. And so creatives have these egos we wanna win awards and we want to, be more creative than the next person. So they ignore the playbooks that the business consultancies give them and they say, okay, let's be as creative as possible.

Let's be different. Yeah. I think I've been saying this for a while, as brilliant as Steve Jobs and Apple. As brilliant as they are, right?

Apple just, I think they did a disservice to the creative world, to the agency world. The whole think different idea. steve Jobs wasn't trying to be different for the sake of it. Yeah.

He was trying to create a better product. He was trying, he was always deep positioning his competition. That was the pathway to differentiation. He didn't start out with trying to be different.

He started out with trying to create something better, whether it was the Macintosh or the iPod or the iPhone or now what they're doing with privacy, which, is right at each step. they keep doing that. they cohere with the customer's needs, right? That's right.

This is of course how they came from a two person, entity in a garage to one of the world's largest brands. It wasn't about the technology. They were trying to solve real problems in a way that was accessible and useful. And I think that was maybe a big part of the difference was at the time, for those like you and I, who remember back then, the idea of computer was, oh, you need to be a computer engineer or a computer programmer to use a computer.

And he's no. It's like a bicycle for the mind. Just get in and play. That's right.

Yeah. Remember when, computers first showed up in business, right? And, you had to go and take a course on how to use a computer and it took two weeks, maybe sometimes four to six weeks. It took some time.

Most people didn't know how to figure it out, and it was hard. And he created the Macintosh, which a 4-year-old could use. Yeah, and they just do it. They do it over and over again.

And the thing about them is they really, jobs really understood brand at a deep level. That's what coherence means. That's like coherence is not clarity. Okay.

Clarity. The way I see clarity, and by the way, clarity is incredibly important, but I see clarity at a messaging level. Coherence is when. The customer understands deeply, like almost like in their soul.

Yeah. What the company stands for. What did Apple stand for before they stood for privacy? They stood for usability.

They created user experience. the computer companies before Apple, the user experience was so complex. it was not even called user experience. It was called just this is.

Fricking hard. Apple free some menus and all that. And they went to, things like material design, right? if I were to look at a desk and that icon represents something that I pick up on my desk, then I can use it.

Yeah. you say the customer actually doesn't see the brand as a choice. They see the brand. As part of who they are.

It's actualizing their own identity too, right? Because when you buy something, the first part of your buying journey is you identify a problem that you have and you need a solution. And throughout that whole journey, you're trying to solve it. that's what Depositioning is.

That's what Apple does now at the highest level. So right now they're doing it with privacy. They anchor everything into privacy, right? Yeah.

Because they can, what's the biggest pain point in the market? Everybody's afraid of their data being stolen. So Google, Amazon, meta, right? Everybody's afraid of that data being sold.

A can deliver on privacy, they position the brand that way, but it's, you understand that's what they stand for at a deep level. That's what coherence is. But then they integrate it deep into the company. It's.

Product, it's organization, it's their people. Like it goes deep. I'm always blown away like when we get on a phone call, with a founder or CEO or CMO, and they still think that branding. Is about logos and taglines, it still happens.

Or campaigns. Yeah. Or maybe having a product that is first to market and Apple showed time and time again. They weren't first.

What they did when they weren't first was they watched what the competitors did and didn't repeat their mistakes. That's exactly correct. Apple understands that the business. Is the brand.

The business is the brand. It's that deep. Yeah. It's a pretty amazing company.

So let's talk for a second about a different company that you mentioned in the book Airbnb. Yeah. And I know you were a kind of a fan of, hiroki asai who, moved over, I think from Apple, to Airbnb. Tell me why you think he's a modern depositioning.

Expert. them and Uber. They found a way to deposition a whole market. Anytime you have a case study, or you see a company like that is not just going after, one competitor, they're actually changing the way that people buy something with a platform.

And they flip the whole market around. You had VRBO or vrbo, however you say it, by the way. They need to change their name. 'Cause nobody knows how to say it.

But, VRBO was out there first, but they just didn't know how to create the experience and market to it. And Airbnb came in, rookie came in, and he was like, listen, here's what we can do. We can completely redesign the whole user experience to make it so frictionless. We are not only gonna deposition VRBO, it's gonna be everything.

They depositioned hospitality, right? Yeah. I mean they became a competitor to Marriott and Hilton. And, Hyatt.

It's just, that is an incredible case study. Again, Uber, also, same thing. They did the same exact thing. They depositioned the whole market.

These case studies are, amazing and the fact that we're seeing this happen, over the last 20, 25 years, Yeah, I think it's pretty remarkable. And you're seeing it, you're seeing it too now with ai, these AI companies, right? The way that, open AI and Gemini. And Anthropic, are attacking each other.

And this the war, in the market is fascinating. Really fascinating. Just Airbnb and others, they're trying to get to something that is quite, a vulnerable and personal aspect of, the user experience. So yeah.

Take Airbnb, I myself have been, 500 miles from home and, late at night and I could be walking into a hotel lobby where I know there's going to be a guest manager, but instead I put my faith in Airbnb and, when there was some issue with the lock or. Me being able to get to where I needed to be. They came through and they knew that they had to not just carry it, in the marketing, but all the way through to post sale. You say that's where the customer actually witnesses you.

Delivering on solving that problem that you said you would, and that's the thing that is required for depositioning. It more than just saying, we're doing it, you have to actually do it. You have to act it. You have to walk the walk.

What I just was just saying about, the business is the brand integration, coherence, integration. If you look at Airbnb, just what you were saying now, about, all the way down through every step of the experience. Yep. they're solving every single problem.

Yes. Brand positioning is about owning. A singular idea in the mind of the customer. Apple owns privacy.

Volvo owns safety. But they deliver it through at every step and it never ends. And so they own the solution to that one hero pain point. But there are pillars that stand up, that positioning and those are other pain points, right?

apple has shifted their advertising money into post-purchase, Because they're creating this environment, That's one of the smartest strategies in the history of business, right? Everybody was spending all their money on advertising 25 years ago. And right now, and even in the last 10 years, it's been programmatic display and people are in a frenzy with, all the performance based marketing that is trying to just focus on acquisition. That's right.

Apple spends on post-purchase. Why? Because they get you into their environment. They get you into their ecosystem, and you're there, and you're in a place where you love.

Why would you leave? It's pretty amazing what they do. Let's talk for a second about the way that someone can, start to work through and think of these pillars. Yeah.

So you talk about people thinking about, a dimension, right? A dimension of, what the customer is looking for. The most obvious one that we all go to, I suppose is, an. Economy to luxury kind of dimension.

Yeah. There's millions of them. Sure. And then you say you want to figure out how to put yourself at one pole of that dimension.

And by doing so, toss your competitors all to the other side. Are there any examples you can think of to give us of that or maybe walk us through the steps that your team does when you're like thinking or maybe Samsung or I know you use the Samsung and Google Android example to make it really clear for people. I think, what would be helpful is explain how we do it. when we're immersing ourselves into a project with a client, there's two things that we're looking at, right?

We're looking at, customers and their pain points. So we're making long lists of pain points, looking at customer journeys, and compiling all the pain points to try to get to that place where we can figure out what is the one hero pain point, or maybe there's two or three, that we could potentially own. So that's number one. So we're looking at customers really closely and figuring out.

What is their pain? The second thing we're doing is we're looking at competitors, right? And what are the weaknesses, that they have. Everybody's trying to solve pain points.

but businesses have to solve pain points, right? Yep. the bottom line is that you're looking at customer's pain points, you're looking at competitive weaknesses, and then how do you find the solution to those main pain points, and specifically what we call the hero pain point and solve. First of all, the first thing you have to do is as a business, you have to solve it, but then you need to figure out how to communicate.

Your solution and in a way that you deposition your competitors and exploit those weaknesses. So how it's a shift away from, like I mentioned earlier, what most agencies are doing, which they're looking at differentiation, how to be different, and they're looking about how to be creative. So there's intersection of differentiation and creativity, or bringing those two together. And at the end of the day, yes, that might get you something that's unique, but it might be completely irrelevant.

We see this a lot. Brands come to us and they're like, yeah, we hired this, fancy schmancy agency and it cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars and we got this kind of really cool, beautiful brand, but it's not working. Why is it not working? And we look at it and we're like that's easy.

What are you selling? What's the pain point that you're solving? You're not solving anything. You're being clever.

But nobody remembers like tactically from a communication standpoint, what are you delivering? People don't get it and people don't have time. For brands to be overly creative. Everybody's, the markets get more cluttered because they get, more competitive.

Todd, you don't have to, I gotta clarify though. I have to stop you. Sure. As ahead of a New York based agency telling me that it's not all about winning creative awards.

Yes, that's, you mean, we actually we're, it's okay for us to be, dare I say, dull by working correctly on positioning instead. By the way, it doesn't mean you have to be dull. Brands can still have distinction and personality. That's okay, but you're anchored to the depositioning.

Do you think Apple's dull? Nope. No. Exactly.

If you analyze their website or any of their communications in their stores, they're consistently just solving your problem at the highest level, at the headline level. But they do it with, the copy is beautifully written. The images are beautifully shot or videotaped to show my age. The images are beautiful.

The copy is beautifully written. It's designed so well. It's creative as hell. But it's the focus.

It's creativity for the sake of it. Differentiation for the sake of it, which is what most agencies focus on. Correct. That's the issue.

Yeah. caused by the economics of an agency trying to stand out in a very competitive market itself. So they have at that point, maybe not done what serves the client best, but maybe what is trying to serve them best. agreed.

Creative people have egos, they wanna win awards, they wanna be better than the next. They wanna win a can, they wanna win it to one club, they wanna win A-D-N-A-D, all that stuff. And that's their motivation a lot of the time. Yeah.

And I think that, it unfortunately rolls downhill to the customer. I think when you have, agencies that are trying too hard to do those things or maybe to. Tout to puff up the brand. It ends up, the brand ends up through that creative sounding like they're reading you their resume.

Yeah. And that's a total turnoff for a customer. Yeah. Totally.

there's a, very nice, hotel in New York City, which I won't name, but, everyone knows it and they're, it's a venerable old brand. There are many venerable old buildings in New York City that have lovely hotels in them. But this, the cryptic message that they had in this ad was, we are an icon. I'm like, okay.

So what? But you're an icon. Do I wanna stay at your hotel? would you lure me to New York to come and, stay in your hotel?

that to me is sometimes we just lose track of what we're trying to do. You mentioned one part, and I think it's the glue here, you call it integration. So can you take us through what integration is and how it fits into deep positioning? Yeah, it's a great question.

Integration is really, the antithesis of what most marketers think brand is, right? The logo and the tagline, integration is. When you come up with a brand strategy, and it's not just marketing, it's not just, your voice or what you're communicating, it's built into how you design your products, how you develop your culture at your organization, how you treat your customers. It is The organization living and breathing every ounce of what the brand stands for.

The one thing about integration that, the way when we do, integration workshops, we start with brand, right? And we we're looking at markets, we're looking at customers and competitors like I mentioned before. And what comes out of those workshops are product ideas, right? True integration is taking brand to the deepest level of the organization and the brand.

Just, or the organization just living and breathing brand. That's what integration is. Yeah. But to do it.

I think you're asking marketers to show leadership. And you gotta tell me, Todd, have you ever had moments with a marketer, where they're willing to share in a moment of confidence that, They don't know if they've got that kind of stature in their organization, if they've commanded that kind of respect. If they're up to the task. Yeah.

And what would you say to that marketer? Yeah, listen, integration is a hard thing to execute on. and to be honest with you, it needs to be integrated at the CEO level. I think the good thing about integration and CMOs understanding what integration is that.

Integration is something that the CMO needs to sell into the CEO. It actually will create some glue between them, which by the way, there needs to be glue there But it needs to be executed on. From the top down, and that means above the CMO, from the CEO. Okay, so it's about the CMO selling, the idea of integration to the CEO, buying it and then saying to everybody else in the C-suite or the GLT or ELT, that, Hey, we're gonna stand for this and we're gonna build it into everything we do.

We stand for beauty. Okay, we're gonna create beautiful products. Okay, so let's get rid of those products. 'cause they don't fit our brand positioning.

I think, there's an interesting case study about Disney. This goes back I think about 20 or 30 years ago. There's a big branding agency that was doing a repositioning of Disney. I had heard this as a story, from somebody at this agency, but it's an interesting story.

Disney, Walt Disney was an entrepreneur. He bought like all these businesses, so Disney was this company that had, they owned trucking companies. They owned pizza chains. he was just, buying everything.

new leadership came in and they did this big brand positioning project, and what they found out was that Disney stood for this one thing and it was magic. It was magic. And so they're like, we gotta stand for magic, right? And so what did they do?

They integrated into the business and they sold off all the companies that didn't stand for magic. The trucking companies, the pizza chains, et cetera, et cetera. And what did they do? They bought Pixar.

They bought Pixar. Now I remember it's in the, creativity Inc. Book. Ah, okay.

Capital. This is a great book. We'll put that in the show notes. Yeah, it's a great book.

They bought Pixar and look what it did to their company. But they stood for something, okay. At the brand level, but they integrated it deep into the business. And that's what I'm talking about as far as, the business is the brand and vice versa.

So yeah, Disney is a great example of that. Great example. Oh, that's very cool. And when these things are all pulled together, one of the things that really stood out to me was when you said that, it's rising beyond the logo and the tagline.

Companies may have, campaign specific taglines. if you ask me what that is for a company like Apple, I don't know who knows, but I do know what. Their brand means. So even though I don't know what it says, I know what it feels like and I know what it means.

And I think that when Depositioning is done correctly, that's what we're left with. That is what I mean. that's where clarity or coherence comes in, right? So step one is be customer first.

Step two is find the hero pain, point to solve, know your competitors' weaknesses, but deliver it at a deep level and deliver it in a way that's so clear and coherent to the customer. There's the old saying if people don't get you in three seconds, they turn their back on you, right? The old adage of an ad only works after they've seen it six times, right? People are walking down the street or scrolling down the, whatever, with blinders on so much, right?

'cause there's so much out there, right? So you have to be as clear and coherent as possible. if you analyze apple's, communications, that's what's so brilliant about it. it's so clear.

You get it. Spam, like mass. Amazing. You've done a great job on breaking down the process for people in the book.

And if people want to get the book, Todd, where would they go? Amazon. Positioning is on that? Yes.

And if they want to find out about you, about your agency phaser, where would you like to send them? Our URL is Faser, F-A-Z-E-R Agency. And you are available on places like LinkedIn? I am on LinkedIn, yes.

Buy the book on Amazon. Todd, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks, Glenn. It was fun.

I know it gave folks a wave to think about their, marketing and their branding and think of ways to make it even better.