Published on LinkedIn

By Natalie Pantaleo, Marketing-Communications Consultant and Author

Here’s a challenge: take any discipline, any practice, any approach to anything— cooking, graphic design, booking a restaurant reservation, listening to music, or watching your favorite show— and I bet the tools and delivery channels you utilize have changed (some drastically) over the past two decades. Yet, if you think about any of the paradigms your mind conjured, you’d probably agree that the essential principles behind them remain the same.

For a simple example, I’ve collected a small library of cookbooks on my kitchen shelves over the years and still enjoy perusing them from time to time to expand recipe ideas. My 17-year-old daughter who also loves to cook introduced me to TikTok for recipes (albeit I still prefer my books). Though the two approaches are accessed from different delivery channels, and technology has provided the advantage of watching a video of a recipe being prepared as you attempt to make it yourself, the fundamentals of the recipes are the same: ingredients list and cooking instructions.

This theory is certainly true within the realm of marketing. Just consult Ries’ and Trout’s, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, which are still, well, immutable, and especially the very first law: “convince consumers that you’re the only viable option” . . . hence the importance of positioning.

In a recent chat with an original Madison Avenue ad man and one of my career mentors, Joe Caserta, former CEO/CCO and partner at DSC Advertising, Tyson & Associates, and others, we got to talking about Joe’s first experiences with positioning.

“I remember my early days at N.W. Ayer in New York. I guess it had to be somewhere around 1966 or ’67 when companies would pay a concept development fee to short-listed agencies selected to bid on the account,” Joe recounted. Most agencies at that time applied the funds to developing nearly fully executed ad designs and campaigns, which, in many cases, meant bringing new talent onboard.

“At Ayer, we had a unique approach,” Joe paused. “Naturally, we had super talented folks working on the account, who produced design boards and campaign concepts as compelling as the competing agencies, if not more so. But we also had a secret weapon up our sleeves.” Instead of using the development allowance strictly on creative, Ayer would put the funds toward extensive customer research, largely focus groups and interviewing consumers, and eat the costs associated with design.

What the leadership at the seminal agency had figured out—and the primary reason for the brilliance behind so many of their iconic brand stories, from Morton salt to Camel cigarettes to the first US volunteer Army— was that they knew the sharpest, most beautifully designed materials were completely irrelevant if they didn’t resonate with targeted audiences.

I never tire of hearing Joe retell stories about one of Ayer’s conventions used to do just that, which they called “the rustle pile.” “In the early morning on pitch day, we’d get a copy of the first edition of the newspaper and ‘rustle’ through it to find parallel brand stories and metaphors for what we were about to present to the [potential] client,” Joe explained. “Before everyone gathered in the boardroom, we’d paper the walls with various related headlines and creatives from the paper, then present our concepts. This immediately energized a creative interactive discussion with the client about uniquely positioning the product against its competitors, underscoring the importance of understanding customer perceptions and needs. Plus, it showed the breadth of our approach, and in most cases, won us the business.”

Showing instead of telling at its best; just plain genius.

Uncovering customer needs is fundamental to creating targeted and meaningful campaigns and remains a cornerstone of positioning. Further, the rustle pile isn’t that dissimilar from say, utilizing the competition’s customer reviews on Amazon for insight into developing a unique brand promise that delivers on a targeted audience’s preferences. Different channel, same recipe.

As many marketers know, the four key elements of a strong position comprise identifying a target audience, frame of reference, the product point of difference, and reasons to believe. What they don’t know, as described In a recent Forbes article, “Demystifying the Science Underlying Brand Positioning,” by contributor, Stephen Diorio, is the how. “The reality is brand positioning is much more difficult than it appears. Brand position is much more science than art. So rigor, iteration, judgment and experience matter,” Diorio writes. “Brand positioning provides the blueprint for the marketing program that fuels it (e.g. advertising, content marketing, product marketing, thought leadership, and value selling assets and programs) and the systems and processes that support execution.”

My mentor, Joe, would take the concept behind the ‘ole rustle pile with him as he went forth in his career to lead agencies of his own, while adopting new and emerging practices that achieved the intended results – an intelligent approach to consumer intelligence. Through his firm Tyson & Associates, Joe once again led with essentials of positioning for the successful launch of Caesar’s, Atlantic City before moving up the boardwalk, so to speak.

“There’s no better example of successfully utilizing customer research than with the account we landed for Showboat casino in Atlantic City,” Joe affirmed confidently, which resulted in selling Tyson to Ketchum, a larger agency with greater resources needed to meet the challenge. During Atlantic City’s gambling renaissance, Showboat was in a challenging position. “It was the smallest gaming property in A.C., and poorly situated at the far end of the boardwalk away from walking traffic,” he clarified. As such, the casino needed to become a preferred destination.

Joe and team dug in, and what they learned resoundingly from focus groups was game-changing: “Casino-goers did not visit casinos with the expectation of winning money. In fact, they didn’t mind losing a few hundred bucks . . . so long as they had a great time doing it,” Joe revealed. Hence, the information facilitated the casino’s Mardi Gras theme, “where the party never ends,” carried through every conceivable touchpoint, and resulted in winning industry recognition for unaided awareness, plus “best casino” by the Courier Post six years in a row.

“As I’ve said, any campaign can have the best graphics, but if it doesn’t deliver a compelling message to the audiences that matter, it isn’t worth anything,” my mentor upheld. “We were fortunate in that the leadership at Showboat understood this, and all the elements of position and execution came together perfectly. It’s incredible when that happens.”

Learning from this ad guy set me on a trajectory for diving deeper into positioning in my own career, which led to developing a user-friendly 10-question audit on my website that helps raise awareness for marketing professionals about the strength or weakness of their organization’s position.

Diorio pretty much sums it up— “The medium and channel may change, but the importance of communicating a differentiated value story that drives margin, ticket size, retention and cross sell at every stage of the revenue cycle is more important than ever.” Amen.