7 Ways Brands Fail to Differentiate (and What to Do Instead) with Louis Grenier, Founder of Stand the F*ck Out | Ep. 345

0:00Hey besties, welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. I'm Tamara Griminski, stepping in as your guest host while Daniel is off doing dad things. I'm a longtime product marketing leader and the founder of PMM Camp, a community and newsletter for product marketers. And today's episode is a fun one. I'm joined by Louis Grenier, the unapologetically French, contrarian creator of Stand the F Out. Louis is on a mission to help marketers stand out without selling out. You might know him from his time at Hotjar or from his podcast where he's interviewed folks like Seth Godin and Rand Fishkin.

0:34Now he works with companies to build positioning and brands that actually get noticed. And his book, Stand the F Out, breaks down his entire process. In this first episode of our two-part conversation, we dig into the foundation of standing out, insight, positioning, and segmentation. Luis shares the six questions every marketer needs to answer to find their edge. and we unpack why fluffy personas and overcomplicated segments are killing your marketing. Let's get into it. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies.

1:19The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. get ready to turn the f*** up. Louis, welcome to the show. Bonjour, bonjour. Bonjour. I'm Canadian, so I actually did study a bit of French growing up. Obviously not the right French, as you would say, but I could maybe follow along with a few French words. Don't put words in my mouth. That's, it's a different version of French. I love it, actually. French-Canadian is, I've made a few friends along the way when I was traveling, and I always find French Canadians funnier, whatever they say, because the accent makes it way, like they sing it more and they have a few words that we don't use that are just very funny to me.

2:04So yeah, don't be ashamed. It's all good. Maybe we'll sprinkle in a few French in this episode. But I want to start today with kind of the big idea that sits at the heart of your work, which is what does standing out even mean to you? Because you talk about standing out as being this like core part of what we should all be focusing on i don't actually talk about standing out um i talk about standing the fuck out and i know that might sound like a smart ass answer but i think it needs the additional swear word to really show the intensity at which nowadays more and more we do need to stand out right we do need to differentiate in a way that is honest we need to do so by you know gathering insight that others might not find about our customers.

2:51And we need to take some risk in some way, shape or form in order to be distinctive, to be noticed in the market. So it's not just standing out. I think it deserves a bit more, you know, oomph and intensity to it. So it's really about standing the fuck out. I love that. I do think the word differentiate gets tossed around a lot and has kind of lost most of its meaning. So I'm excited to dig into that today and see how we can get a bit sharper with standing out. one question I had that I was curious, just as I've been exploring your work is like, what pushed you to care so deeply about this idea?

3:26Like, did you have an experience where you realized standing out, like not standing out was detrimental to your success or you saw a brand that was really inspirational that you thought was standing out? So let me take you back to my high school year. So around 15, 16, 17. And at the time I was very contrarian already and i was being contrarian to be noticed by others because i was craving approval craving the attention of others and the only way i had learned to do so from my early childhood to then was was uh to get attention this way especially from my mom because she wouldn't notice me uh if i was uh being a nice little boy right so the only thing that i would uh do that would work was actually to try to pick poke holes in her thinking or when she was wrong or to do stuff that she didn't like me to do, like being contrived like that and so that muscle started to develop on its own and I used to do that with my teachers and with my friends and whatever, that has became that kind of became my default way of thinking and this didn't connect to my career until later on when I realized as well that the internet was kind of a thing that I really liked to spend time on.

4:43Because, you know, as a teenager, it was just the start of high-speed internet and making websites yourself. So when I had the connection between, I started to connect the dots between, okay, I'm a contrarian, I like the internet, but also I feel like I have a good emotional intelligence. So I understand people quite well, or at least I have the curiosity to lead me to think, okay, why do people do that? Or why don't they do that? how do they think that I always kind of like that so if you make the intersection of those three things it creates a good cocktail of how do we how do I use my contrarian kind of personality and channel it in a way that helped me to make a living on the internet mostly by understanding how people behave and how they think and I think the intersection of that is pretty much standing out.

5:32So finding ways to make brands stand out, finding ideas that are quite creative or that go against the grain and doing so by still understanding how people would probably think or react to those things. So it took me decades to arrive at the point we are today. So that's kind of the backstory briefly, or not so briefly. And the second catalyst was actually a conversation I had with Seth Godin on my podcast years and years ago. where we were talking about this exact point of standing out. And I asked him, let's say you take an internet company that is just boring and that provides services just like the others.

6:11How would you make it stand out? And he said, I don't know if you made that mistake on purpose, but you can't ask this question this way. You have to ask, how do we make something remarkable that is different so that you stand out, right? Not the other way around. Don't take something boring and average and try to make it stand out. but that for that answer frustrated me because he wasn't giving a map at all about how to do so and i find it quite i mean i love the guy and i find him so inspiring is one of the reasons why i'm in this field but i find it a bit fluffy and a bit easy to say not so easy to actually do so years after that part of the conversation kept popping up and popping up and i it became a niche I needed to scratch up until I was starting to, you know, helping other brands to do that.

7:01I was also working for Hotjar, the product marketer, as the only one on their positioning. And so I managed to revise my own kind of way of thinking about it. And so all of that led to the book, Stand the Fuck Out, and pretty much what I do today. So as you can see, it took me, what, 30 years. That's fair. I love that. I love that you've kind of been like evolving your thinking as we go. And today we're going to spend quite a bit of time on, you know, the concepts in the book and the canvas that you've built. But before we get to that, I'm curious about your philosophy around, you know, it sounds like you believe that being contrarian is a way, maybe not the only way, but a way to stand out.

7:37How do you balance that with once you've kind of captured attention by being contrarian with also providing a sense of belonging? Because I think in order for someone to want to buy from you or stick around or buy again, I believe that there needs to be a sense of belonging. like, wow, this was made for me. You know, obviously Seth Godin talks about tribes as well. Do you view those two things as in opposition or am I making some assumptions here about your philosophy overall? Yeah, I mean, you're making assumptions which are normal to make based on what I said earlier. But so the concept of standing the fuck out is bigger than me.

8:11I realized the power of it when I started to talk about it. I just had run a class about it years ago and people use the term to describe their way of of doing so of using their courage and taking some risk and whatever and so i always say that this isn't a method to replicate my way of thinking and to be a french contrarian far from it in fact it's like there's millions and millions of possibilities i mean probably billions really if you actually do the math so i never teach people to be like me. I teach people to, one, find insights, the reason why people behave a certain way, find little insights from your markets that competitors can't find.

8:56Two, developing a unique positioning that gives them a compelling reason to pick you. Not a bullshit reason, but actually a compelling reason solving problems that competitors have overlooked. And then developing a distinctive brand that gets noticed. There's, again, millions of ways to do so. and finally finding the right people at the right time. So it's really not about being contrarian and steering the pot on purpose at all. It's pretty much to your point. It's about connecting, like giving. I mean, I don't go as deep philosophically in terms of like sense of belonging and all of that and creating loyalty because that's proven by marketing science that that doesn't exist, but we can talk about that.

9:40I can rant about that for a bit. the only thing i try to give people is a roadmap that they can use that is universal that won't change to enable them to to stand out in a crowded market whatever they are doing um and it's based on first principles of marketing psychology uh stuff like that and this is kind of the answer that i was looking for that i couldn't find anywhere else in marketing books and wherever Totally fair. One of the things I love about the framework that you have is that it is so clear, you know, and easy to follow. The steps are laid out. So why don't we dig into a few of those?

10:16What I love about how you start the framework is that you start with insights and research, which I think a lot of people skip over. I think when most people hear the word, oh, I need to stand out, they immediately go to maybe some of the more brand components of standing out. Like, oh, wow, we need new colors. We need a new logo. We need a slogan, whatever it might be. But your approach starts with, as you said, first principles, foundations, customer insight. Why is that so important to reaching the final conclusion of being able to stand out? I changed my tune on this. I used to swear by just research.

10:49You need to do research, you need to interview a customer, you need to send surveys. If you don't do that, you're a loser. I've changed my tune because I've realized over the years, you don't necessarily need to do brand new research, meaning gathering new data. You don't even need sometimes to just dig old data. Sometimes your intuition and experience in the field is way more than enough to actually lay out the things that you need to construct a unique positioning, distinctive brand, and continuous reach, which is a way to get customers. So finding insights doesn't necessarily mean doing research like what we would call research, like the product marketing, customer research, you don't necessarily need to do so.

11:35But what matters is that you ask yourself the right questions. And the six questions that you need to answer, if you answer them properly, deeply, then you already have far more than what most brands or companies would ever have. So what is the actual thing that people want to accomplish? What other things have they tried or considered to accomplish this job? What are the problems, struggles, whatever, pain points, whatever you want to call them, that prevented them to reaching that job? What is the category of thing, product, services that belong to where you belong in your market's eyes? what events or specific situations have compelled people your customers to act and to actually do something about it and then what group of people would be the most compelled to act based on those struggles what do they have what struggles do they have in common that lead them to act and pick you over the others so i think i would say that instead of focusing on research as the key word for this phase i would say it's more yeah those those those questions about how people behave or think and once you have that just by asking yourself the right questions i think you're ready pretty far and if you don't have experience don't have a lot of intuition about what's going on if you try to create a brand in a category that you don't know about then yeah you're gonna have a bad time because you're gonna really struggle to answer those questions properly with specificity, which is a word that I use all the time because you need to be specific in order to find opportunities.

13:22So yes, then it means you can do research, but it doesn't have to be hardcore customer interviews, hardcore like 20-question survey. It could be a simple conversation with a customer who already bought something from a competitor. It could be analyzing chat transcript that you've had the last week and just the questions that people ask. It could be mining reviews. on Amazon or whatever. So there's many, many different ways to gather those insights. So yeah, it's not always about research, but it's always about those six questions. I love that. So what I'm hearing is like, you don't always need to complete new research, but you need to go and look at the information that is available to you to answer those questions.

14:05One thought I would love for you to tell me more about is like how you view the connection between best customers and segments. So when you're approaching this work, are you looking at all of the insights that are available en masse and then kind of refining and breaking into segments at the end? Or are you taking a bit of a lens, an opinionated lens at the beginning to say, hey, I want to actually focus on this best customer group. And I'm actually refining into mini segments within that as an output of the research. That's a great question. And I don't say that lightly. It's a great question because I've asked myself this very like challenge when I was developing the methodology and writing the book it's like it's almost a chicken and egg situation because to learn from a group of people to get out of this insight you kind of need to make a guess at first so my my approach now is I ask people to pick to think about their last their best customers of the recent past and I usually work with smaller brands but for bigger brands it's it's you can use the exact same with the the sales team, customer success, or even the CEO and whatnot.

15:14And I purposely don't necessarily give them too much detail about what I mean by best customer. I basically say the ones that you might have enjoyed working the best with or if you had 100 doors in front of you and you knew exactly who was behind each, who would you knock on first? This kind of stuff. It's just to make them think about beyond the demographic, thermographic bland deconstruction of customers. So I make them just visualize those people. So I force them to actually think about one or two or three persons, but real people. And just like, then once we know those, you have them in mind, then let's try to answer those questions.

16:00And then once we have answered to those questions through research or whatever, this is when we kind of go back from the beginning and try to only find one core segment. So I know the question you want to ask at the very end, which is the marketing that I'm willing to die on. There's so many hills around there that I'm willing to die on. One of them is product marketers, brands, marketers in general overcomplicate segmentation to the point where I'm actually, I want to vomit a bit every time. so because they forget about the reason why segmentation is important segmentation is important not because someone told you so not because niching is in niches in other in the riches or riches are in the niches or whatever the fuck you need to understand why first of all so the reason why we must pick a specific group of people is because we want to give a specific group of people a compelling reason to pick us over the alternatives and we do so by solving problems that they struggle with a lot doesn't have to be a crazy amount but at least they stuff that they can't they can't achieve their job because those things are in the way and they are important to them and they're not solved uh at all or not properly by alternatives so therefore when you are there and propose a solution to those things even if you're not known the likelihood that a group of people who share those struggles more than the average who feel them more than the average the likelihood that they'll pick you is higher so this is why niching down is so important especially as a challenger brand this is why you need to focus your attention on one core segment and so instead of starting with okay we have five different personas so we have marketing mark marketing mark is 35 and is it boston whatever no that that doesn't do anything to you because it doesn't explain the struggles they have in common or what makes those this particular group of people suffering from those struggles more than the average so the question is not what age or what fucking demographic are your personas the question is who tend to suffer from those struggles that you've identified that others don't really solve well more frequently or more acutely than the average because then that gives you a group that is more likely to respond to your thing?

18:25And the answer to that question is your core segment. Then yes, you can split it in different ways to target sub-segment inside there. If, for example, you go LinkedIn ads and you need to pick specific demographic, firmographics, you need to target that group in one way, shape, or form. But the only thing you should care about when you define a segment is the attributes that they all have, that they all share, that explain why they struggle more than the average. You are preaching to the choir with this one. I am a big segmentation nerd and also allergic to the word persona, I always say, because I think personas are completely useless 99 % of the time.

19:02You know, my philosophy here is like, if you can't clearly identify your anti-segments, then you probably haven't refined your key segment close enough, right? Like you need to be willing to alienate people in order to be as resonant as possible with that best customer. And, you know, I've worked in a lot of tech companies and often I will get pushback from executives, the CEO, board members who be like, well, what about all of these other customers that give us money? Or like, what about the TAM over here? And I always say, like, when we think about best customers of this key segment, it doesn't mean we're not going to serve someone else.

19:38Like someone can come and buy my product if they want it. Like, I'm sure there's people who buy your book who you would not define as your key segment, right? You're going to take their money. Hopefully they get some value out of the book, right? That's awesome. but you're not going to market to them. The cover of the book was not designed for them. You're not going on podcasts to promote to them. And so there's, I think, an important difference there for people to recognize. It's a gigantic difference, right? And I don't know if you agree, but to me, it's not a marketing or business problem. It's a psychological problem.

20:07It's a problem that stems from our need to feel like what are we, the fear of missing out, right? The fear of what if, oh, if we don't get out to this group, you're going to miss out on so much money and whatever. So a better reframe, like a helpful reframe I found is to ask yourself instead, what are we missing out on by not focusing on that group? So we might miss on like better knowledge of that specific group. We might miss like better insight. We might miss extra revenue because all of the attention and resources would go to this group. So therefore we can upsell to more things. We can learn about that, whatever, right?

20:44So like you are missing out on way more by not focusing your attention, especially nowadays more and more, because if you really want to give a group a compelling reason to pick you, you really have to go narrow, specific, or else you're just going to blend the fuck in. I love that. I'm going to definitely borrow that question. That's a really good prompt. I want to turn a little bit after we have these insights. So we have the insights. We look through them. We feel like we have alignment on who this key segment should be. And then the next step in your framework is the actual positioning itself.

21:21And you recommend a specific positioning statement format. And I'm just keen to hear, like, how did you land on that format? Are you actually sold that that format is the one that unlocks, you know, the rest of the standing out? Or is this you just had to make a call on one? Because I'm sure, as you know, as a product marketer, there's so many different positioning formats we could use. Yeah. So I'm not married to the exact structure I'm using. So the structure is something like, unlike alternatives, we are the only whatever in that category that solve those struggles and help this segment reach a job or something along those lines.

22:01And the reason why I'm not very specific about it or anal about it is because it doesn't really matter. what matters more than just following the exact structure is clarity of being able to write briefly your positioning in one sentence even though grammatically it's correct but then you wouldn't put that on a website because it's very long and convoluted but are you able to summarize and distill the reason why people should pick you over the alternatives in a compelling way in just one phrase and if you're not then you don't have positioning because you're just not making the right choices. So it's what I try to really instill is like, you can follow any template, I don't care, but it needs to give them, it needs to give the reason why you're uniquely positioned to give a specific group of people a compelling reason to pick you.

22:55That's fair. One thing that I noticed about your work is that, you know, where a lot of positioning experts stop, like let's say April Dunford's framework, she kind of stops once we get to this positioning statement. You take it a step further and you have two whole steps after, one of them being this like distinctive brand component. And you specifically talk about the brand kit. And I'm curious, when you think about someone walking through your framework, do you view this as being like one individual who now is kind of moving on to step three and four? Or is that more, well, I might hand this off if I'm a product marketer or a marketer leading the first part.

23:30Now I'm going to hand this off to a more focused brand marketer. Like, who do you envision being able to, I just feel like there's a lot of mix of different skills once we get to the back half of your methodologies. Yeah. So, so like credit to Apple Dunford on her fantastic work. She inspired me to actually dig into the topic a lot more. I think her approach worked really, really well when you have a product that is innovative in some way, shape or form, meaning that within that product, there are features that are offering a compelling reason for customers to purchase you. And it's mostly for B2B tech companies that have a lot of budget and a true innovation and all of that.

24:10So distinctive brands, all of that, I understand why it wouldn't be that necessary for that specific group. But for everyone else, which is most people listening anyway, when you want to start out in crowd in market with many direct competitors and no true, true, genuine, compelling reason to be picked that you need to actually engineer, then you need more than just positioning. So you do need more than just a unique positioning. I like to say that the compelling reason, the positioning itself, that's more the rational side of things. It's more the, you know, something that your devs and everyone else can get behind.

24:46The distinctive brand is more the irrational side where you're going to have to do some weird stuff to be noticed it doesn't have to be crazy but it has to be it has to be distinctive in order to be noticed and cut through because if you don't nothing's gonna happen you can have the most beautiful unique positioning in the in the world it's going to be very difficult so you know it's funny because you mentioned brand marketer versus product marketer and stuff like that that's another hill i want to die on i would be willing to die on is that product marketing shouldn't exist uh It's one of the most awkward fucking discipline because marketing, like product, has always been part of marketing.

25:24And we just create that function because most in B2B and tech companies are so enamored about our product and we're so complexifying everything that we do need actually people who are competent enough to re-explain it simply so that people fucking understand it in the first place. So if you learn the true foundation of what marketing is, you need to, you understand how people think and how they behave and how they notice you and how they remember you. And if you don't have brand in there, then there's no point because that's how people construct concept in our mind to help them think about stuff.

26:01Brand is not a product of marketing. Brand is a product of how people think. We need brand to make decisions in our daily lives. We can't start from scratch and make decisions about new cereals every day. we do need some categories and nice little boxes that we can have in our head so that we can take decision fast so branding is not a mental construct or else it would have disappeared so like i know it's a very you know zigzaggy way to to to answer but i wouldn't try to create those barriers if you truly want to make the company you work for or your company stand out meaning selling more to a group of people who want to to buy from you and and finding where the demand is and growing, whatever definition you give or whatever like segmentation inside marketing you gave, it doesn't matter like, because you need all of this.

26:54Yeah, what I'm hearing is you need kind of alignment. One continuous thing. I will have to fight you on that marketing hill though. Oh, please. You know, everything I do is related to product marketing. I do hear you though, like one of the pains of being a product marketer is that we often feel like, you know, no one really recognizes like us as their team. that, so like we are almost an outsider to product. We're an outsider to marketing. And I do think we've overcomplicated what the role is meant to do. However, based on my experience working at many startups and scale-ups, most marketing teams are not equipped with the skills or the mindsets to actually complete those activities.

27:33And so we have a need. Because most marketing teams are communication teams. Yes, exactly. Which is, if I'm not mistaken, four percent of the job of marketing um that's one mark reedsen who would split those three stages like diagnosis um i'm gonna fucking butcher it now i have it it's a basically a simple equation of the with the four p's and the and the three core stages and essentially communication is just a tiny tiny tiny percentage of our responsibility so i completely agree in the perfect world the marketing team would be trained on foundational marketing skills which includes what we do and product marketing doesn't have to then have its own thing it's like go to market gtm like i can that's another hill i'm willing to die on go to go to market is one of the stupidest thing i've ever come across reverse engineering recreating the fucking wheel and calling it a different name I mean, go to market.

28:31What else is the marketing supposed to do apart from going to the market, coordinating with whoever creates the product? I mean, yeah, it's just a symptom of B2B tech who's just creating problems out of nowhere and stuff. And hopefully it will, they will, you know, like anything that the pendulum is going to swing back soon enough. But yeah, it just drives me nuts. Me too. We could have a whole episode just of the Marketing Hills that we would both like to die on. Oh, yeah. It's a chain of volcanoes for me. Yeah. Okay, before we wrap up the episode, I want to chat a little bit about maybe one or two brands that you love, that you think are standing out and doing a good job, whether you think they've followed your methodology and you've worked with them before or if they're just brands that you appreciate.

29:23I think we should do two episodes, right? We'll break it into two parts so we can talk more. I love it. I'm down. So we will leave it on a break where you can tune in to hear more about how this actually comes to life. So before we end today, then I will give you one chance to share one more marketing hill that you would die on that is separate from the ones you've already shared today. But you have to promise me that I can add another one later on as well then. I promise you will get one per episode, one per episode. Okay. One is the fact that marketing is not changing and that it's the tactics and the tools that are changing.

29:59So anyone trying to sell you this idea that marketing is changing is full of shit. Okay. I love that. Tell me more about that. What does that actually mean? Well, that means that the very foundation of marketing are based on psychology, scientific stuff, people, the way we behave and think. And this is not going to change anytime soon. We are a product of millions of years of evolution. We are a species that is like a social species, whatever. And it's not because we have iPhones in our hands that we are changing the way our brain cells are configured. So anyone who's trying to tell you that marketing is changing, he's either trying to sell you something so that you'll buy their$99 product.

30:38Or they mean the tactics in order to reach customers and understand them are changing and you need to update, you need to adapt, which I completely agree. But the very fundamental of marketing is not changing. Okay. I buy into that. I buy into that. Okay. Well, thank you for coming on for part one of our now two-part conversation. And we will stop here and listen to our next episode to see how we continue. Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.