your marketing works for your competitor

Brought to you by The Art Of Positioning Podcast

I was on LinkedIn before I started the business, scoping out the lay of the land per se.

And doing that scope, well it inadvertently did more harm than good - but in hindsight, if I didn’t know the ‘rules’, I wouldn’t know what to break later.

Because doing that scope had me following the ‘LinkedIn experts/guru/insert word of choice here’ and greedily downloading and saving ‘hacks’.

Trust me, I’m side-eyeing myself here right now.

All that had me ‘doing the thing.’ Like... post at certain times. Write in a certain way, short sentences, bullet points. Clear over clever. Go and comment, loads, every day.

Live on LinkedIn essentially.

One strong opinion after another about which words to use and which ones are super cringe.

Like…are they actually cringe? Or is it just overused to heck right now and we’ll have forgotten them in 8 months?

Anyhow, I followed diligently, did all of it.

And those people still exist, maybe different titles, but they’re ready to pray on newbies.

What none of it ever did was get me that trust. Or that differentiation.

Every single one of those rules came from someone who was already winning.

Where do industry best practices actually come from?

Nobody handed me a document. I absorbed it, same as everyone does.

Consciously or subconsciously… it’s gonna happen.

Basically anytime you start something, you look at whoever's already there, leading the way, and you copy the shape of a working thing because yours isn't working yet. The pricing. The service page. What a proposal looks like. What you call yourself in the first line.

It feels sensible, and everyone does it. I did it for a good couple years without once asking where any of it came from. Maybe the workforce training kicking in.

When I did finally pull my head outta my… I realized that it was so simple, so innocous that it’s easy to overlook.

Best practice comes from whoever was best placed.

Somebody with scale and a reputation and a budget did a thing, it worked at their size, and it got written up as how everyone should do it.

I've come at this before from the market side rather than the rules side.

So the rulebook is written by the people it already suits. And we follow it without thinking about it, because if you’re anything like me it was like: there’s already enough decisions in a day, why have one more thing to question?

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Your business has been around long enough to earn trust.

But the audience that got you here is changing. And the next one may not care about the things that made you successful in the first place.

So what do you do? Keep playing it safe until relevance quietly erodes? Or panic, rip up the brand, and leave loyal customers wondering who the hell you have become?

Beatrice is joined by Michael König, who has led design and product inside heritage brands including Bang & Olufsen and Royal Copenhagen, and Mateusz Owi Owsiany, CEO and Creative Director at MPM Team, who builds immersive digital experiences for brands reaching newer audiences.

They get into how to evolve from a position of strength, test a new direction without betting the whole business on it, move beyond a founder-led brand, and make sure creative, commercial, and customer reality are all in the same room.

Because your next audience should not have to come at the cost of the one that trusted you first.

"Your Customers Grew Up. Did Your Brand?" is out now on this The Art of Positioning Podcast episode - listen here.

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Why do clients keep comparing us to bigger firms?

Because we keep reminding them of said firms.

Every post I wrote back then looked like every other post in that space.

The same structure, same line breaks, same clear-over-clever voice. Strip my name off it, and you'd have had no idea who wrote it.

So it was doing 2 jobs at once. Telling people what I did, and reminding them of everyone else who did it.

Which is where the money goes.

Your buyer comes off a call feeling slightly safer with the name they already knew. And your material has spent years confirming that the name they already knew is the normal version of this thing.

You're funding somebody else's recognition out of your own budget, every month. Blurgh 🥴

Why isn't our marketing working?

I had the content version of this one. Things happened. Impressions, comments, a bit of a following. And hardly any conversations that went to a decision.

At your size it shows up differently, and it costs you a lot more.

• The deals that close still come through you. Your team runs the same material and it lands differently in their hands.

• Every conversation ends up at price, whatever it started as.

• Prospects say they're talking to a few people, and the few people all sound like each other.

• A new hire's first instinct is to make your stuff look more like the big firm's. By everything they were taught, they're right.

• You could take the logo off your best case study and it'd read fine as somebody else's.

That first one usually gets read as a sales problem, right up until someone checks what the team was actually given to say.

Except, none of that is marketing failing.

Marketing took what it was given and put it in front of more people. Built to industry standard by someone who learned the industry standard from the firms everyone in the industry looks up to.

Marketing worked. That's the *ucking problem.

And this is the moment most of us go and buy a fix before working out what's broken.

Should we rebrand?

Not for this.

I know the instinct, I've had it plenty. When something isn't landing, the pull is to smarten it up. Tidier site, sharper words, a more ‘current’ look.

A tidy-up on top of inherited rules turns you into a more polished version of the thing people were already mistaking you for. Basicallly, an expensive way to disappear.

There's a real difference between changing what you are and changing who needs to hear it right now.

Speaking of rebrands, Inc Magazine ran a piece last month where I was the expert on exactly that. When a rebrand is the answer, and when it's lipstick on a pig.

How do you stop copying your industry?

I could hand you a worksheet here. Most people would.

The first move sits upstream of any worksheet, or checklist, and there's a better example of it than anything I've got.

In 1956 Taiichi Ohno went to Detroit to study car manufacturing. GM, Ford, the equipment suppliers, the full tour of everyone doing his job better than he was.

What changed how he thought was a supermarket.

Shelves refilled only as things sold. Nothing sitting out the back on the off chance. That became just-in-time, and manufacturing spent the next 40 years copying Toyota.

The story usually gets told as a lightbulb moment in a shop, and that's not what happened. Toyota was already running a supermarket method inside their factories by 1954, and Ohno had been reading about American supermarkets for years before he ever got there. Which makes it better.

He spent years of looking where nobody in his industry was looking.

He could have studied car manufacturing harder. And he'd have got car manufacturing answers.

Same for me. What got me out of that LinkedIn playbook was never going to be better LinkedIn advice. Same applies to the work I’ve done in the brand strategy/positioning/business context/category/insert-word-of-preference-here world.

So, how do you take this and roll?

🏏 Badass tip

For the next month, take zero business input from your own industry. That means the sector newsletters, the competitor teardowns, the "how the top firms are doing it in 2027" posts, and anyone whose customers look like yours.

Read about something with nothing to do with you. Hospitality, logistics, a sport, a trade, a museum, whatever you'd read for the fun of it. When something over there works, ask what problem it's solving rather than what it looks like.

Then look for the ground nobody in your market is standing on.

Nobody in my industry was ever going to stop following what they’re recommending.

So go and look somewhere else.

🦘 B