S06.E16 - De-Positioning: A Bold New Playbook for Brand Strategy with Todd Irwin

0:00I 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.

0:25Hello 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, before we jump in, if you're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you'll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault, and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you're done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the wait list.

1:12That's joinbba.com. Now let's get into the show. 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 Phaser, an award-winning brand strategy firm and the author of the brand new book, Depositioning, 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.

1:51We're going to discuss why traditional positioning frameworks are failing modern brands, how depositioning gives you an edge by attacking category norms, and the practical steps you can take, well, CMOs 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 the Bible.

2:29Yeah, he's great. Amazing, amazing guy. He is, he is, he is. And yours, obviously, we're 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. um yeah we're launching uh or it's it's coming out in europe in september uh in the states late october early november india south korea brazil yeah all over the place that's awesome yeah well let's get into it because there's a lot to unpack here right so rethinking brand positioning and let's just start off with the problem like of the status quo so you've said most brand positions fall flat.

3:08Why is that the case? Yeah, for decades, you know, the gospel and marketing has been the same, so to speak, you know, find your white space, stand out, be different. I mean, you know, if you know the brand gap, right, there's so much about differentiation. It's a big part of that book. The thing 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, you know, it's repeated over and over again, every MBA program, every agency pitch, every marketing book. And, you know, and here's the thing.

3:45It'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 this. 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? 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's changed completely. Those gaps are filled almost instantly.

4:20Any 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, we say it's kind of borrowed time. It's just about 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.

4:57And 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 depositioning comes in. I talk to all my friends at all the big agencies that are 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.

5:37And that's not theory, right? That is statistical. So depositioning 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, 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 deposition them. You deposition them in the market. It's exactly what Apple does, right?

6:25It's really, you know, I've been saying for a while now, you know, Steve Jobs, the line think different, right? It's really think better, right? 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 thinking, 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 depositioning. So we're talking a little bit about the classic differentiation versus distinctive debate, which sort of rattles on quite a bit.

7:04So what I'm hearing here, Todd, is, listen, is 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. Galloway 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.

7:51I 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, seeing brochures from Ogilvy saying, here's the ROI in marketing, right? I mean, it's just been, it's endless, endless, endless. And 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.

8:33And so chief financial officers, 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. Customer, people love brands. They attach themselves to a brand. And for some reason, the C-suite's 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.

9:14And 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 right 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 right they need to be briefed differently It's not that, you know, some people say to me, well, what does that mean?

9:57Creatives 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 Reeds, 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.

10:36The 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, you know? So, and we say that too. It's like, stop focusing on differentiation, focus on dominance. Yeah. How do you dominate? Solve the problem. So. Thanks, Tom. 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?

11:20How do you actually get that to the CMO, to the CEOs, make it actually happen? Yeah, it's tough. The skepticism out there is real. It depends too on who we're working for. 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. But even I think that when you have CEOs who are seasoned, they've been around the block and they've worked with agencies here and there.

11:56They've done the branding thing here and there. They have some semblance of sort of getting it, but it's education. You've got to educate the C-suite. We run workshops for, I run an agency called Phaser. 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 saying that, it's unbelievable.

12:38And 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? You're working with them quite often. So how do you bring skeptical 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?

13:15And 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're talking to 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 you present them? I guess you're not uncovering them in a workshop or are you coming in with your research?

13:51No, you're doing both. Nobody knows the customer, like the CEO, CMO and the C-suite. I mean, You've 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. The thing about depositioning 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.

14:41But 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 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 positioned around privacy. He's taken Jobs' theories and philosophies on marketing and ran with it. He hasn't deviated at all. Does that answer your question? A little bit. The big point here is about the customer and the through line between all of this. But you mentioned before about the ROI and sharing that with the CEOs and everything.

15:27So how does that actually show up in performance or ops or anything like that? 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.

16:04But if you look at how they integrated usability or user experience into the company, They positioned the brand at the beginning around usability, and that 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. If you're building a brand and want to do it right, this is for you. Join the Brand Builders Alliance for expert coaching, live masterclasses, and a crew of brand builders who've got your back.

16:51Get on the waitlist now at joinbba.com. Now back to the show. Why do we think that is, right, still after all these years? Is it because that's sort of the end, I guess, the tangible stuff that people can get their arms around? Because we've been talking about this for like 10, 20 years, right? I know, 30. How is this still something which people kind of just can't get their heads around that 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.

17:28Exactly. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it. 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. There's 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 that the hot iron that puts that on but it 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 the mark itself um and i do think it's the most peculiar thing because if you literally sit down with someone i love to say this someone 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 are the world's greatest brands the world that have 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 still having this conversation.

18:55I have a lot of thoughts on this. Well, first of all, I mean, where branding came from, right? The word brands, right? People think of branding a cow, right? So it's just a, it's an icon on the back of a cow, right? And then it turned into, if you look at the history of brand, you know, back to the Greek and the Roman empires and how they, 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.

19:39It 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, in different verticals, with different types of products. 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. I mean, you know, a lot of the work that we do in Palo Alto, you know, technology companies, these companies start out really complex, right, with the type of technologies that they're building.

20:22They start out with CEOs and founders and technology officers and marketers and this and that. And they're all trying to, like, 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.

21:00That seems to make sense to me. It's quite plausible. I think that education is a problem too. and that's what 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, you know, skepticism is everywhere. You know, agency churn rate is so high.

21:36You know, 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. 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?

22:19If 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 Neumeier 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, you know, 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.

22:53And then again, it's the same, it's the same answer, Jacob. It's, it's, it's education, workshopping and teaching your clients. It's critical, really, really critical. Do you think there's any like mindset shifts that they need to get over or need to think about depositioning 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, it's the reason I wrote the book. And it makes me think of a story of why I wrote the book. If you guys don't mind if I tell you a story, right? Yes, let's do it.

23:31Okay. 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. So 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 in MBAs, business, they would always tease us.

24:12Oh, you branding guys, you're going to ruin our strategy. you know we 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 and 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 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 was fun a lot of fun and then one night out drinking you know i said to the guy who was the uh 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.

25:08People 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? 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 i 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 depositioning came from that's the that's the depositioning 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 uh all the big branding agencies they're so talented, so wonderful.

26:26They're wonderful people. We just need a little shift. One of my strategy, my head of strategic excellence, this guy, Craig Bagnon, 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. So do you want to just share a little bit more about the book? 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 I, that's why I wrote it was that I, you know, this, it just wasn't an article.

26:59It wasn't just a series. You know, I had written, 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 onto 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.

27:38That's the mission. And that's why I wrote it. And how has your perspective changed from agency life to been an author? Oh, it's I'm so I still run phaser F A Z E R. We're about 25 people. We're a boutique and you know, we're in New York and London and we have some people in Boston. So I'm still, uh, still chief strategy officer, but the business pretty much, um, runs really, really well. We've got some really smart people. So, uh, I, I don't know, uh, if I'm going to completely go into like authorhood, but I think there's probably a second book maybe in like two years. Yeah. Something like that awesome any matt did you have any follow-up questions yeah well you know what's what's beyond the depositioning like you mentioned there could be some follow-ups like i'm just super interesting what's on your mind right now what where do you where do you see the the need beyond this one yeah i 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 and he's also a differentiation hater yes we had him on a few a few months ago oh did you yeah oh i want to listen to that that's great yeah yeah oh how was he oh yeah brutal that's how he was yeah yeah but he's an amazingly smart guy and yeah the work that they're doing at erinberg bass I think is so 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 Bromaniac right something like that Bromaniac 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 it's so helpful because otherwise it's just well that's what you think and that's what i think and and you know then you're back to kind of just like the the you know you're the picture people it's like no no this has some real tangible scientific backing um and And that's really that rigor that I think we need to bring to the space.