Great companies have a POV, but most are too scared

Adam Ketterer: The premise of this series is that great B2B brands have a distinctive point of view…Discuss!?

Stan Woods: Yeah that’s our job, really: to convince clients that great companies have ideas, have a point of view – because most of the people who come to Velocity for help don’t have a point of view. They come for a positioning but they don’t have a POV. They don’t even understand what it means to have one. And once you explain it to them, they’re allergic to it. They don’t want to put their head above the parapet. Even though it seems so obvious that the brands with a POV – like HubSpot or Gong are good examples – are the ones you remember a year later when you need to buy a CRM or whatever. So it’s actually really frustrating that the biggest job in our positioning work is often convincing clients that they need a POV!

Doug Kessler: They want to be all things to all people, and that’s probably the number one problem in positioning and marketing. They feel like a stance or a POV will alienate somebody, and it kills a lot of them. I’m always looking for beliefs, I’m harvesting them.

SW: Then you get somewhere with it and they start to share the work with their stakeholders and it gets pecked away. You know, it’s that fear of…”What if we have an Alaskan client who’s left-footed and bald on the right-hand side of their head – we can’t ignore that segment!” The older I get, the less tolerant I am of that kind of thinking.

POV gets harder as you grow. Salesforce blands down. Google gets a taste for evil.

DK: That’s why working with founders is key. You get founders who have a really clear view of their market and a strong belief about how it should be changing. It gets harder in bigger companies where you might be five generations away from the founder. Or you might have 30 products and it’s like, each one of them needs a POV – it doesn’t need to be huge, but the product is there for a reason.

AK: Right, one-product companies tend to have the purest POV.

DK: And the more the shame when they don’t have one! It’s like, “Hey it should be easy for you, just f*cking crystallise it!”

SW: And the big players are in a great position not just to have a POV on their products but on the market and where it’s going. If you bet the farm on SAP or Salesforce or any of these big companies, you’re looking to them for a view on where the market’s going in the future and what that will mean for companies like yours. And I think people like Benioff [Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO] still have that founder mojo.

DK: He does but they’ve got so big that – his keynotes used to be like, “This is where CRM’s going.” Now they’re just so huge that their POV blands down because it has to encompass so much.

SW: Did you see that Google are in a race to acquire HubSpot for like $31 billion? And it looks like it might go ahead, and you kind of think, well why would Google buy an application company – and one with mojo? The only way I can rationalise it is that there’s a fight going on with Microsoft and the whole AI thing, and one area that Google isn’t in at all is that enterprise app thing – but you kind of look at Google and you think, “well what the f*ck do they stand for any more?!”

DK: Yeah it used to be that information should be free, and cataloguing the internet –

AK: And “Don’t be evil” was their motto, right?

DK: Yeah, now it’s like “Wellll, maybe a little evil.”

SW: The bigger the company, I think getting a POV is the easy part – getting everyone across all departments on board with that POV is the hard part. And it involves a whole load of written materials and webinars and reminders. We positioned a company – about half a billion dollars so not even that huge, but four or five departments doing different things – and getting them to accept the work we’d done was the biggest challenge. The bigger the company, that bit feels more and more important to me.

DK: I always think of it like gravity. It’s like a balloon, if you don’t keep f*cking wafting it, it’s gonna fall! And some as*hole’s gonna win in a meeting.

Start with some beliefs, not your definitive values

DK: I’ve been working a lot more in the zone of beliefs. What companies will do is, the POV or positioning becomes hard as they get bigger or for whatever reason, so they skip to values.

SW: [Does the wanker hand gesture]

DK: It’s like “Excellence” and “Frankness”, and they’re all the same. And I say wait, don’t go all the way to values. Beliefs are somewhere in between – they’re not full positionings in themselves, and they’re not values, but they’re always expressed in the product, the services, the model. These are core. And you can remind yourself that you have these things.

At Velocity, I feel like when we remind ourselves of our beliefs – things like respect for the client, fundamental sh*t – it’s inspiring and you realise that not everyone has them. You think they’re generic but they’re not. They’re defining. So I like that territory for clients. And I never call them THE core beliefs, it’s always just some of our beliefs. Don’t make them think they have to get in a room with a f*cking flip-chart and decide. And usually the input process churns them up.

SW: Yeah your heart sinks when they ask for values or a mission statement. We worked with a large telecommunication company and the values were so anodyne. That’s the problem, you start with a place of – I was gonna say anodynimity but that’s not a word –

DK: It should be. Ano-dy-nim-ity…hehe.

POV and tone of voice: every company has their ‘thing’

AK: It reminds me of so much tone of voice work you see that’s just so bad. It’s an afterthought and it’s voice-by-numbers. But if you actually have a POV, if you have something worth saying, the tone of voice should be kind of emergent.

DK: I know what you mean. Sometimes you think I could take this voice guide and just give it to the next client and be absolutely fine. And that’s true, there are like four or five things about a good B2B voice that everyone should have – like looking you in the eye, no bullshit, having some fun with a few winks. But each company has a little thing. Maybe it’s “You guys are geeks!” or “Hey, you’re commercial as f*ck. You’re all about making money for your clients.” So they feel like flavourings but sometimes they’re defining, and I find that that’s real. And similar to beliefs, if you find it in yourself and you can be true to it, something real does happen.

And it’s probably because the normal B2B voice is so f*cking horrible that the step up to what we’d call Generic Good B2B Voice is a huge step and that’s a win. The ones we’re talking about are subtler than that on top, they have to be real.

The perfect client

SW: It’s so rare you get that perfect storm of a company that knows it needs to be distinctive with a POV, also understands that that’s gonna change pretty much everything about its go-to-market, and thirdly believes in marketing. And if you can get that perfect storm each time, then this work would be not just easier but so much more effective! I mean when did HubSpot start, 2006? It took them like eight to ten years to rise above. It’s a long-term game.

DK: I do think it’s changing. More marketers get it. More CEOs get it. I look back to our early days versus now and today there are way more professional marketers on the other side of the table who get it. Way more stakeholders who get it. For me, it really has improved.

SW: And yet the tenure of CMOs is shorter than ever. I wonder whether the one-eyed focus on MQLs is the thing that’s killing people. The guys who are 50 today have only ever known the whole numbers-based, accountable marketing – and suddenly people tell them you should do long-term brand building but you won’t know if it’s worked for years. It’s like back when people were first told smoking was bad for you.

The dot-com crash and the birth of Velocity

AK: You guys have recently put out some content that says Brand is Back. And there’s been general recognition in recent years that you need long-term brand building as well as short-term stuff, from Field and Binet and whatnot. So you guys as Velocity – and as a two-man shop back in the day – have basically seen the death and resurrection of brand. You started out, what around the dot-com crash?

SW: Exactly at the crash, yeah.

AK: Good timing! So what has that journey been like? Has the kind of work you’ve done changed much?

DK: It’s funny because it really still was the colouring-in department back then, and our metric was “They liked it!”

SW: The dot-com crash was fundamental to the birth of Velocity. Our channel was VC firms when London had lots of VCs (it’s all PE now) and they put like 12, 15, 20 million into companies that were gonna become a feature in about two minutes. And the bubble-burst meant that they weren’t going to take any of these companies public, and suddenly they had to go for trade sale. So we came along and said, “Hey we can tell a much better story than you can. And maybe that story will increase your trade sale from five million to 10 million, and you’ll get some of your money back.”

Doug came from an advertising background where, you know, Dove soap – you had to really think about what made this soap special –

DK: [Raises finger.] It wasn’t a soap, it was a beauty bar!

SW: So we brought that mindset. And we got to the creative really quickly. That was a differentiator for us. We could substantiate and show the positioning in real marketing. To me the positioning process has always been – what’s that Winston Churchill thing – a mystery wrapped in an enigma. It’s actually – you know yourself, Adam – it’s literally asking some really simple questions and listening to the answers, and then synthesising that into a story. Maybe the main difference was that back then, our stories were quite long – paragraphs – whereas now, we’ve got the Galvanizing Story and increasingly it’s about finding those two or three words. Can we boil this down?

The performance ‘versus’ brand myth. ‘Just enough’ brand? Trusting your gut.

DK: Another difference is the whole brand is dead thing, or brand versus performance debate. But I think the performance data is actually proving that brand is what works. It’s not just the absence of a tailwind if you don’t have a brand, it’s an actual headwind. And the opposite is true when you have a brand. So it was natural to swing to performance marketing and building a pipeline machine because it was new and hard to figure out. And it worked. But slowly what they started seeing was, after all, an investment in brand is what works! It’s not a case of the hard-nosed salesperson versus the marketing snowflake. No! The harder-nosed you are, the more you want to invest a big f*cking chunk in brand! And I love it. It’s not about swinging back to a new extreme. It’s swinging back to a balance that’s incredibly powerful. I don’t wanna see it swing too far back to colouring in. It needs to come to where people value brand appropriately.

AK: Yeah we don’t want too much brand. But it feels like we’re in a place now where the data’s getting pretty good. We mentioned Field and Binet. People like System1 measuring emotional responses to ads. And teaming up with Adam Morgan to quantify the cost of dull marketing.

DK: Absolutely. You know people whine all the time – ”It’s hard to measure, wahhh” – well f*cking get over it and start trying. That’s part of it. And part of it was that we were trained that if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter – that’s not true at all. Doesn’t your gut tell you that this way of showing up in the market is better for your company. Do you have to wait for something to move on a dashboard? Honestly, if that’s what’s stopping you…

Company-level metrics. CrapGPT, the sequel. Positioning as pattern recognition.

SW: The Cost of Dull and things like that are great. But they’re at a general level. You know, People like Jon Miller say you should be spending 40% on brand. But what does that mean to this particular CMO? What should they be spending it on? I do think that to be successful and convincing, we need company-level KPIs that show brand is making a difference. Then the CMO can go to the CEO and prove it.

I’m still wrestling with what the best engagement metrics are. Do you remember Doug, how we used to talk about content brands – and what that meant. And part of this story feels like Back to The Future, you know? We’re not actually saying Binet and Field and whoever are saying anything controversial. People have been saying it for a long time, but we’ve become swamped by the data and thought all the answers were in the data. Which is another reason why there’s so much shit. You press the button and the machine spits out content.

DK: Yeah and then no one comes back cos it’s so shit. There’s one metric that Joe Chernov at Pendo and others are using: branded search. Are people putting our name into Google? That’s not the trickiest metric to measure, and I know it’s not perfect but it means something. If it’s going up, something’s happening. Brand will do that – and I think it works a lot faster than people think. I don’t think it takes ten years. And Joe found that the people who came through those branded searches were more engaged too.

AK: You mentioned AI. It feels like it must be time for Crap 2.0 [a sequel to Velocity’s viral hit about the deluge of crap content hitting the internet back in 2013].

DK: There’s one on the way! Called CrapGPT. For the ten-year anniversary of Crap and the ongoing enshittification of the internet (phrase courtesy of Cory Doctorow).

AK: Amazing. Stay tuned for that. Okay I want to get a little deeper on your POV as practitioners. How do you guys position yourselves and Velocity as brand-builders?

SW: I think it comes down to pattern recognition. People say there are only seven kinds of story or whatever. Well I think there are really only like four or five B2B positioning story types. When I go into a client call, I find myself being reminded of this and that previous positioning job. Now there’s danger in that, cos it can shoehorn you into samey thinking. But I do think that pattern recognition is key. The other thing is that our clients are likely to do one or two or three of these positionings or repositionings in their career. We’ve done hundreds. Without being arrogant about it, we’ve just seen it more.

The Galvanizing Story. Separating positioning and story (or not)

DK: I’m a framework-averse kinda guy. I don’t like them. The Galvanizing Story [Velocity’s story framework] started evolving and I have to give Andy Raskin a hat tip – someone mentioned after the fact that it’s similar to his Best Deck in The World thing. I think it works. Is it the answer to your whole world? Of course not. But if you can’t fill it out clearly then you’ve got a problem. And I always think the very top of it – the change in the world – is the most important part –

SW: Most important one.

DK: Yeah if you nail that so it’s true, it’s motivating change. We’re talking about overcoming inertia so if there isn’t a change in the world then why the f*ck would you change? You gotta nail that in a credible, compelling way – it can’t be all that controversial, and yet it has to be fresh. The rest kinda flows from it. The rest is never hard.

SW: It has to be more granular than, you know, “AI is changing marketing.” And it’s really bewildering to me. Our customers find it very hard to put themselves in their customers’ shoes. People joke about the “Build it and they will come” but that’s what a lot of them are doing. They’re not putting themselves in their customers’ shoes – maybe they do in sales, but not in marketing so much.

AK: The Galvanizing Story is cool because you’re doing both the positioning and the storytelling in one – and that can work really nicely. It took me years to almost define my own terms, and define how Beneath should do positioning – stealing from Andy Raskin and April Dunford and you guys along the way – and part of that was to draw a line between positioning and story. The positioning is the boring list of facts about your differentiation – they’re your ingredients that you can then use in the story.

DK: That’s neat, I see what you’re talking about and I do agree. I’ve been having fun trying to voice up the Galvanizing Story trying to bridge that gap a little bit and not let it be the backend firmware of the company. Even though, well done, it can be the firmware of the company and so long as you know it’s not the story you’ll be fine. But why not try to voice it up, and then it starts to lead you to –

AK: Yeah and you’ve done both, you’re just doing it quickly.

SW: That’s why the creative is so powerful. Firmware is actually a good way of describing it. But if you can show how the Galvanizing Story – which clients criticise for being too wordy, by the way, even when they like it – if you can show how it works in real marketing, that’s when they get it.

AK: Yeah you have to be clear about what this thing is: is it messaging or is it copy? Is it back end or front end?

DK: People say “Don’t worry, this will never see the light of day verbatim” – and I’m like “Why not?! Do we not believe in this story?” I think it could be put up there on the website, a nice Galvanizing Story.

Positioning Doug and Stan: supercollaboration, not waffle irons

DK: I think we are geeky about this stuff, and being that way in public – as you are at Beneath – is part of our positioning. We’re genuinely interested in it. Having done it a lot, we get to see some patterns that are cool. But I’m always surprised by the specificity of the work. We never bring a waffle iron – even if we know there are a handful of story types. We just listen hard and the more we write down specifics, the more it emerges from that. So I like that. We’re not over-preaching a waffle iron like some guys with frameworks do – like some of the category creation guys. You know, category creation is not right for everybody, and it’s not the only way to win, and if you try most companies will not succeed. So I like that our methodology is not something you diagram – because it’s so embarrassing, it’s like: “Ask questions…Come back with ideas…” No, if you’re trying to apply your waffle iron then you’re not listening hard enough.

SW: And I say there’s only like four types of story but in reality there’s an almost infinite number but you recognise the patterns and you can say, “Okay it’s a little bit of two, and four, and a pinch of seven.”

And we should probably have said earlier on that the best positionings come not from us but from this kind of supercollaboration with people who are open enough to tell you the story and get into it. Back in the day Doug and I used to go away to the mountain and come back with the story – [Moses voice:] “Here’s your positioning!” Now we iterate with the client maybe three or four times before we get to the answer. And the result is better.

I always say to clients: “We have one advantage over you and one disadvantage, and they’re the same f*cking thing: we don’t work for your company, so we don’t bring any baggage but we also don’t know as much as you do about the nuance.” That’s why we work so closely, and that’s a big change we’ve made over the years. Much more intimate and collaborative. It’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis like hegel or whoever said. It’s very hypothesis-driven. I go in with an idea, test it, and reject it when the evidence comes up. In the end you’re synthesising it with everyone’s feedback and coming back.

DK: And way more often it means everyone’s on board with it. The story doesn’t become shelfware.

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