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Mistakes in Positioning Language

There's a standard set of words that a lot of undifferentiated firms use to try describe how they're different and why they should be hired. I've commented on terms like full service, strategic, responsive and others ad nauseum over the years (and I'll comment on them so more in next week's newsletter, Seven Words You Can't Say in Business Development) but there's one phrase I've heard over and over but never really saw a pattern of use until recently.

The phrase is, "We get it." I've heard firms use this phrase to describe to me how they think they're different from their competition, but I've recently been seeing it on agency websites. It's starting to make it into written language. But what does We get it mean?

It seems to be another set of words trying to convey the intelligence of the firm, in the same way the word strategic is employed. (We're not a design firm, we're a strategic design firm.) Sometimes, when I ask an agency principal about how his firm is different from a particular competitor I hear the words, "They don't do strategy." That phrase leads to my favorite parlor game which sees me pose the question, "What is strategy?" then I count off the seconds of silence while the question is considered for what seems to be the first time.

Both those phrases, "We get it" and "They don't do strategy" remind me of a phenomenon that I used to see in my agency career when doing qualitative research for clients. We called it the Idiot Neighbor Syndrome. When an consumer is asked in an interview how he might respond to a certain offer, situation or set of stimuli he would reply, "I get it" or "yeah, this would work for me," but then follow up with a caveat that he was smarter than the average person and therefore didn't think it would work on someone more representative of the target market, like his more normal, less intelligent neighbor. "Yeah, I get it - that's great. But my neighbor probably wouldn't."

To me, "We get it," "we're strategic," and "they don't do strategy" are all manifestations of the Idiot Neighbor Syndrome. The truth is that these aren't meaningful words when trying to set one firm apart from another. The even harsher truth is, your baby is probably just as beautiful and ugly as the next, even if your motherly love tells you differently.

The only meaningful differentiator of firms is expertise, and the simple math on building deep expertise is this: the narrower your focus, the deeper you will go. When it comes to positioning, that's the only it you really need to get.