How to Position Your Brand & Products: 5 Ways to Win Against “Better”

Matt Bertulli (0:00)

Okay, welcome back to the Operators podcast. I got my compatriot, Mike, from Simple Modern. Today we have Matt Orlić joining us. He's one of the co-founders of Qure. Matt is joining us all the way from Croatia, but we got a banger episode. We are talking positioning today. And when Matt suggested we do this one, I actually love this because so many companies that come out are just trying to win on better. And I have long, long said this. I think you need to be different. And we are going to argue and debate, and then hopefully provide you with some frameworks on how to think about positioning products and brands. Because I think the brands that do scale, like the really big wins, almost always you can point to something that's quite different about them. And the latest example of this would be Groons, right? Like Groons, completely smashed, entered into a very large category, growing category, with a totally different way of entering it.

And they positioned very much as different. They were not coming out saying, hey, we're better than this. They just came out and said, we're different, here's a different option for you. So, Matt, why don't we start with you?

Most brands do lead with better. I think it's like the easiest thing to do, say like, I have a better mousetrap, better ingredients, better price, better something. Why do you think this doesn't work? Like, how do you think about positioning? Let's start there.

Matt Orlić (1:23)

Yeah, I think better makes the mind fairly defensive, right? I think better is probably the worst word you could use in marketing because it's like the weakest word. Essentially, the way you want to think of it is that consumers already have like a ladder in their mind. Per category, they might have three to four different brands. By using better, it's very hard to replace like a rung on that ladder. You almost have to create a whole separate ladder altogether.

Then the second reason is that if you look at like the market sophistication levels, like we take Winx's example, stage one is like if you're first to market, you just say fall asleep faster. Stage two is like you can fall asleep faster in 10 minutes. Stage three, that's when people stop bleeding those claims, they start inventing unique mechanism. Then stage four, people create a better unique mechanisms. So maybe Winx example, back in the day people will be saying, Melatonin is a new mechanism, that would have worked for a while. Now, people use that, thrash that. Now it's like what's a new mechanism, that's better than Melatonin. That's when potentially you guys come in with, you know, Melatonin free version and different stages to allow people to sleep longer. And then stage five is all about identity.

So having claims of just saying you're better, literally like, it's just like semantic satiation in the consumer's mind, where consumers just numbs that message. And we have to understand that the mind is like a prediction engine. It's filtering out things all the time. And that's why if you're just using better all the time, literally, it just doesn't cut through these days.

Matt Bertulli (2:50)

And that's the two main reasons. I think there's like an algorithm thing to this too, right? Like Meta's AI and how it does targeting is very much like mimicking what you're talking about, right? So like if you just come out and you look the same as everybody else, this is why I hate this trend right now of like people just ripping other people's ad formats because it's like, hey, this is working, just rip it. We're just increasingly making the consumer blind to whatever it is. Like, what is it, the age-old thing, guys? The marketers ruin everything.

I think that's like a solid truth in the industry.

Mike Beckham (3:22)

Actually, I think this is one of the reasons why this is a great subject, Matt, because the speed that e-commerce moves at, anytime you find an obvious just kind of angle or hack that nobody else is using, and one of the classic examples here would be like, recently everybody figured out animated type ads were doing really well.

And so you just see this deluge of people using animation, some of them being several minutes long and kind of like insane, like the one that went viral on Twitter. But that's going to be the memetic behavior you're going to see in e-commerce, is that people are going to see something, it's working for somebody and everybody's going to imitate that. I think positioning is one of those things that's more durable, because positioning comes down to things like your quality and your pricing, how is your product positioned relative to your other competitors, in a way that they cannot or will not try and imitate you. Whereas when you find an ad format that's crushing, everybody will and we know they'll come in and they'll imitate that exact same thing. So we're constantly talking on the show. I mean e-commerce, the reason why it's the toughest, I think industry to operate in, is because the speed it moves and how quickly people will copy any kind of insight or alpha that you find. So we got to be after like durable alpha. We got to be after things like modes and positioning is one of the few places where I think you can actually do that.