60. Cut the Jargon: Simplifying brand strategy for better results

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes. 

00:00: Rachel Fairley 

So, Unicorners, how well do you know your brand? Onions? And can you tell a mission from a vision, from a purpose? What does brand essence actually smell like? And did the Egyptians build the first brand pyramid? How many peas are there in promise, purpose, positioning proposition? People, product, price, place, promotion. Ugh. What a load of jargon. What is this language soup doing for us? I mean, we're supposed to make the complex simple, not downright unintelligible. We're tying ourselves in knots with the terms we use to describe what we're doing, the frameworks, the processes that each and every one of them requires us to build. In the language of business, most leaders use language that's common and understandable, whereas in marketing, it's as if each agency and consultant and marketer is speaking their own dialect. How on earth have we got ourselves into this predicament?  

01:01: Rachel Fairley 

Is this confusion the root cause of our imposter syndrome? Or have we shrewdly done it on purpose? And is it partly why the rest of the business doesn't always take marketing seriously? Well, today, Unicorners, we're going to deglaze the jargon plan and cut through the greasy marketing language to answer these questions simply and look for a better way of both expressing and organizing what we do for that task. We welcome Sarah Robb to Unicorny. Welcome to Unicorny. This is a podcast about the business of marketing, how to create value, and how you can help your business win the future. I'm your host, Rachel Fairley. I booted Dom out the studio to bring you a different perspective while he takes some time out. Let's begin. Sarah started her career on the WPP fellowship program as a researcher, a planner, a strategist.  

02:00: Rachel Fairley 

She's worked across many industries in a variety of countries. She was brilliant at Landor, in New York and in London. And then the light bulb went on for her. She realised she needed to leave the trademark proprietary frameworks behind. She studied the world's most successful brands and built her own jargon busting, clear thinking, brand consultancy and training for strategists. Sarah is known, respected and loved as one of the world's leading brand strategists. We've known each other for years, so let's go straight into the studio and help ourselves to a large portion of clarity. Sarah, lovely to see you. I think you're fabulous, as you know. Welcome to Unicorny. Let's get right into it. Why does marketing have so much jargon?  

02:51: Sarah Robb 

I think there's a few reasons. I think, firstly, it's not a regulated industry, right? It's not like tax, right? There aren't exams you all have to sit to be a marketer. You know, in theory, anyone can do marketing. So there isn't this commonly understood framework for marketing or brand strategy that's imposed on a regulatory level or indeed a scientific level. I think recently there's been a lot of great work by the Bass institute to try and make marketing more like a science and to try and bring in some laws and language, but there hasn't been that, there hasn't been the need for that. And hence anyone can come up with anything in theory, right, when they talk about marketing, and anyone can sell anything. I think that's the other challenge with this.  

03:39: Sarah Robb 

And I think partly it is the agency world's challenge in that agencies are all trying to differentiate themselves against each other, selling things like strategy, and hence they will come up with proprietary frameworks, proprietary jargon, visual brand drivers, brand, essence brand. I mean, we could talk about these for days.  

04:00: Rachel Fairley 

Just need to put a TM on the end of it.  

04:01: Sarah Robb 

Exactly. And are doing that. And that is done so that when they're in a pitch situation, it looks like they have something more distinctive and proprietary than somebody else. However, how does that help the client? How does it help marketers? It just doesn't.  

04:20: Rachel Fairley 

It ties people in knots. Genuinely in knots. I always have that moment where a bit like when I see a SWOT analysis, I just put my head in my hands. But when you see these pyramids and they've got mission and visions and purposes and values and beliefs and brand essence.  

04:37: Sarah Robb 

And brand idea, brand promise and a.  

04:40: Rachel Fairley 

Driver at the end, and it's just that you look at it and you think it's like a soup. It's just completely overwhelming. And what I always struggled to understand was, is it supposed to be like that? Like, is the complexity part of the attraction or. I don't understand why people do that. But I think you're absolutely right. It's about differentiating your business being chosen because your methodology, your approach, is deemed to be different and better than the competitions, right?  

05:07: Sarah Robb 

And then layer on top of that, academia or just brand textbooks that, where, you know, someone's writing a textbook, they're wanting to sell a framework. So they come up with another proprietary way of talking about some of the fundamentals of brand building, but they call it something else, you know, or there's the sort of trend of the moment which, you know, whether it's USP's or positioning or purpose or, you know, all of these phrases that have come up understandably, yet they just get laddered and layered on top of everything else until.  

05:37: Rachel Fairley 

You have everything, until you have just.  

05:38: Sarah Robb 

A soup of language that you would never hear a CEO stand up and talk about. And that's my biggest beef with it all.  

05:45: Rachel Fairley 

Why do you think it's a problem?  

05:47: Sarah Robb 

Well, I think it's fundamentally a problem because for the marketers, because they don't feel in control. I think that is really what it comes down to, because there are all of these frameworks being pushed by the so called experts in an industry, whether that's agency experts, academic experts. If you are not already very well versed in running a brand refresh or a brand reinvigoration or rebranding process, you will listen to the experts. I think what that happens is the jargon confuses and it adds this layer of complexity. So you don't feel as a marketer that you can challenge it because you don't really know what the fundamentals are all about.  

06:32: Sarah Robb 

And then hence, you don't really feel in control of the process, and you go with what an outside expert tells you need, and yet you don't fully understand what that jargon is all about because it hasn't been very well explained. But then you don't feel like you can control and push back. Yeah, I think it's just this sort of cyclical thing of you don't understand it because it is so complex and the language is so confusing, and hence you feel this lack of confidence using it yourself. And so then you default to using somebody else to do the work for you, but then you don't feel in control of the work. And it's this sort of awful cycle.  

07:08: Rachel Fairley 

I remember sitting across from some finance folks and thinking to myself, they would never do that about their terminology, ever. Like, P and L is P and L. They're not going to make a euphemism for it. They're going to just say, that's the p and L. Right.  

07:21: Sarah Robb 

But also, that's normal language. I mean, it's just language. It's understood. And I think that's one of the things I got to when I left was like, I need to have a framework that uses words that people will use. Like, you know, why do you need to call these things a verbal brand driver? You know, why do you need to have a brand truth matrix or a brand onion? It's just no one is going to stand up in front of in a town hall and talk about a brand onion. You show me a CEO who's willing to do that and they just.  

07:50: Sarah Robb 

But they will talk about, well, this is why we exist as a company and this is what we do and this is who we are and this is how we need to be, and it doesn't need to be framed in all of this proprietary terminology. And I think as soon as you get to that point, it's quite liberating. And then you don't need to create the euphemisms and you don't need to sort of create the jargon.  

08:10: Rachel Fairley 

I think you're right, though, about the control, because if you're not confident that everybody has understood the same thing and that everybody's expecting the same output, then your feeling that you actually are in charge and that you can move things forward and take decisions is really. It's like being on quicksand.  

08:29: Sarah Robb 

Yeah. Yeah. I think you said something the other day, you know, buffered. You feel buffered in the wind. I just love that phrase. Yeah, you do.  

08:36: Rachel Fairley 

I don't know about you, but I've worked with so many companies over the years where you walk in and you're like, oh, my goodness, you've got 29 different ideas on this one page, constructed into eight different buckets, which all have labels. I don't even know what to do with it. And so everything becomes like a layer cake. They just keep adding on more and more layers until you're thinking to yourself, nope, I don't remember any of this, and I'm in charge of it. Like, how is anyone in the business going to use it? It just becomes words on paper. Right?  

09:05: Sarah Robb 

And there's two problems to that. You know, firstly, everyone knows that strategy is sacrifice, but then who really applies it in marketing, often that isn't applied so well. And then the problem with all the layering is the cohesion. HR do some values in 2018, and then a new CMO comes and does a purpose statement in 2021 because everyone felt they needed a purpose. And then the CEO decides he wants to redo a vision, and none of these things should be working separately. There needs to be this cohesive, linear story between where we want to go with our vision and why we existed as a business and what we do and hence who we are and how we do things around here.  

09:45: Sarah Robb 

But when these things are layered and layered, you just have this disconnect between the different levels and no one understands how to behave to.  

09:53: Rachel Fairley 

Exactly.  

09:54: Sarah Robb 

Sadly. Often when I go in to help a business do their brand strategy, it's not that they don't have one, it's that they've been given something, and it is just unusable. And they have 20 page document, and this is a pyramid, and it's got all these layers, but then it's just sort of sitting there internally, and no one knows what to do with it because it's not speaking to them in a way that makes sense for helping them understand what to do next. You know, there's no action orientation to it. There's no sense of clarity about, okay, this is what the CEO would be standing up to say all the time. This is what he needs to be talking about, or there's a huge chunk missing. And I think it's either messy or missing. That's often what I'm coming in to deal with.  

10:37: Sarah Robb 

And it's a shame. It's rare that there's ever nothing there. It's just that what is there has been done often to drive a outcome from a design perspective or an ad agency perspective. And I think that's the other challenge with all the jargon and these models, is that they are sometimes designed in order to sell the thing the agency makes the money most from. And this is harsh, but true. If you're a design agency, you don't make the money from the strategy phase of work so much as you make the money from the backend. And so the phrases and the models that are used are often ones that will help a design team bring it to life. Whereas a brand doesn't live with designers, a brand lives with the whole organization.  

11:21: Sarah Robb 

And that's often one of the other issues that I think marketers need to really be aware of. You know, these models are often designed for the end selling point of the agency. There are some wonderful agencies out there. This is not some sort of this on agencies. And some of them really understand this, and they don't develop strategies that are purely guided by their and deliverable at work. But unfortunately, many do. And I think just all that markers need to know is that they need to be aware of that. They need to understand the fundamental questions they need to answer to get them to where they need to be to grow the business. And once they know that, then they can hold agencies to account and they can do some wonderful, creative, analytical thinking on what the strategy should be.  

12:06: Sarah Robb 

But I think marketers should own that strategy more than they do many do at present.  

12:12: Rachel Fairley 

And I think that goes back to the control, totally.  

12:14: Sarah Robb 

And the confidence. And the confidence, yeah, absolutely. And the jargon that makes that difficult. So when I left the agency world, I had this beautiful six months where I studied the 182 world's most valuable brands. Because I actually wanted to answer the wrong question. And the question I wanted to answer was, what are the labels I should be using now? I'm an independent brand strategist, so I went into it thinking this is going to give me the definitive answer to do we need a purpose? Do we need a mission? Do we need a blah? The truth is, none of the world's most valuable brands agree. So we are never going to get there. Isn't this one answer? So whoever comes to you and says, you needed this, you need a mission, you need a vision? No one can say that.  

12:57: Sarah Robb 

And the world's most valuable brands don't have consistent labelling at all, but they do have incredible consistency on the questions that they answer. And I think that's where I was like, oh, this is really what this is all about. It's not whether you need a mission or a vision or a purpose. Actually, if you look at Ikea, they have a vision, and you look at Microsoft, they have a mission, and BMW, you have a brand essence. All of these are just answers to the question of, why does our brand exist? That's it. They label them different things. So you've got to just remove yourself from the labelling, but really hone in on, okay, what are the questions we need to answer for a brand? And that's. That's a big one of them.  

13:43: Rachel Fairley 

Oh, let's take a moment. There are three things I've noted so far. One is the pivotal role that agencies are playing in all of this. As Sarah said, there are fabulous ones out there doing stellar work. But as an industry, they have created a lot of proprietary models that all require proprietary terminology. And that is understandable, because at every pitch, clients ask, how are you different? The real answer to this lies in the talent the agencies have to deploy on your brand and on the experience they can bring from doing work with others. But the fear is this won't cut it for the marketing buyer. And so the default answer is often to talk about the agency's unique approach. Hence, we end up with a gazillion ways of expressing pretty much the same thing. Which leads us to.  

14:38: Rachel Fairley 

The good news here is that it does seem we're all trying to articulate the answers to some very specific questions in our strategy. Whether we call it a vision, a mission, a promise, or a purpose, we're all trying to define why a company exists and what it will do for customers. Which brings us to. If marketing is to become more central to business success and not further away. It has to use language that a CEO would use that it will culturally unite the business rather than divide the functions. Marketing. Striving to make the business goal a reality. And this requires effective leadership from marketing, someone who will demand simplicity and unity and clarity from the strategy, so that whenever the CEO stands up to speak, their words sound fluent, unforced and coherent and consistent.  

15:31: Rachel Fairley 

This becomes infectious and it will cascade right through the entire organization. Let's not forget NASA's janitor, who knew he was helping to put people into space, which is a great place to go. Back to the studio. How do the world's leading brands use language to define their brands?  

15:50: Sarah Robb 

So they use language in different ways, but they all answer these four big questions. They all answer, why do we exist? What do we do, who are we and how do we do things around here? And how does our brand look, feel and sound? Why we exist is typically called mission. Actually, when you look at the 181 and you break it down, it's typically called mission. Still, some people will call it purpose. Rarely is it called other things, to be honest, sometimes North Star, I mean, you know, monkey's uncle, I mean, you can call it what you want, you just have to answer the question right. The second layer from that is what do we do? And typically, cold positioning, typically. But again, sometimes, especially in the b two B world, sometimes it's more value proposition or proposition is used there.  

16:34: Sarah Robb 

But again, these are just terms and the process of answering the question is the same process, but the terminology and the jargon used to label it can be different. The third one's about who are we and how do we do things around here, typically called values and behaviours. And it's one of the areas a lot of agencies miss out actually. That if you are a brand and advertising agency, sometimes that piece of aligning it with culture, aligning it with how do we do things around here as people? That's a really important part of the mix. You know, what we say outside, we have to deliver inside. Everyone can say that phrase, but actually you need to build that into your strategy and the best brands do.  

17:12: Sarah Robb 

And then the last piece of it is how do we want our brand to look, feel and sound? And that's typically called brand personality, brand attributes. But again, that's a set of language, a set of words to describe sort of the personality. Fundamentally they're usually just a list of a few attributes, but they really guide all of the look, feel and sound and all of the distinctive brand asset creation and everything you need to do off the back of that, you seem.  

17:36: Rachel Fairley 

Very relaxed about what labels people give to it. As long as they answer the main.  

17:41: Sarah Robb 

Questions, you have to be led by the leader. If your CEO is not prepared to stand up and talk about the brand and the answers to these questions and why we're all here and who we are and how we do this, it's been shown in research that you are likely to fail, that any strategy actually only has a one in three chance of being successful according to research. And partly that is driven by leader, and the leader being the role model for all of this and also talking about it all the time. Read Microsoft's Satya Nadella's book, hit refresh. So much of that. It's a great book to read on business and brand and the synergy between the two, how you refresh a brand and all of that is about this consistency of him standing up and talking about this and driving it.  

18:30: Sarah Robb 

And so I'm more led by the leader now, if you've, I worked on this on Corinthian hotels recently. They've been around for 50 years, got beautiful hotels. They're a luxury brand. The chairman who founded the business is still very much part of the business. It was his family business fundamentally from the beginning. He has talked about the spirit of Corinthia for 50 years. I would have been a fool to go in and tell him, you know what? You can't talk about that anymore. You must talk about values of Corinthian. I mean, why do that? The work that needed to be done was to articulate, what does it mean? Let's help all of the new employees that you're bringing on board understand what is the spirit of Corinthia? How do we do things around here that makes us really special and different? Right.  

19:15: Sarah Robb 

So I think being led by the leadership, especially if there's a founder, you know, the CEO will naturally come and say, I need a mission statement. Give them a mission statement rather than a purpose statement. Your work is to answer the question. Right for them and to help them answer the question in a really compelling way, in a different way, in a relevant way, not to tell them they can't label it what they want. I know, just why would you fight that battle? If there are some people within the organization who feel that we need to redefine our values, but you know that there are others in the organization who were part of creating them in the first place and they feel very wedded to them, you know, rather than going in, like you say. Right. We're replacing the values.  

19:57: Sarah Robb 

You know, we're changing values. Let's just talk about, you know, we've redefined our direction for the business, so now we need to figure out why people are going to care about this externally. So let's start to talk about, you know, how we frame why we exist for those people. And if we say we're a worry about this, then fundamentally how do we need to behave as people? How do our employees need to act like, what do they need to be doing that perhaps we're not doing now? We need to inject a sense of moving faster as an organization. We really don't have that in the way that we talk about who we are and how we do things today.  

20:31: Sarah Robb 

And so then you get exactly like you said to this natural place of, well, we probably do need to relook at, you know, how we define who we are and how we do things, which we've called our values in the past. Shall we still call them values? Oh, yeah, we can. Oh, let's call them beliefs. It doesn't matter.  

20:45: Rachel Fairley 

Sarah. Let's just talk about this. Who are we and how do we do things, the values beliefs thing. What does a good answer actually look like?  

20:53: Sarah Robb 

I can tell you first what a bad answer looks like, and I think there's been a lot of research done recently. There's been a piece by Harvard Business Review, there's been a big piece by MIT Sloan, and a piece done by Booz Allen Hamilton. And they've looked at hundreds of different organizations and dissected their answers to their values. And it turns out there's so much genericism in these answers. Typically, they're one word. And the words that the bingo you might need to avoid are integrity, honesty, teamwork, innovative, accountable, customer satisfaction. So those six are highly overused and, in essence, become these things that wash over people. Tell me a company that isn't honest and doesn't show integrity. I mean, let's not go there. But you shouldn't be in business without these things.  

21:44: Sarah Robb 

And so they're sort of a waste of a way of describing how your brand is different, better, more relevant, more unique than. Than others, and how you need to act as employees in a way that you can sort of understand and act upon. So worst practice is a generic list of those six words without anything else. You know, the best practice and more common is where brands today are digging into some of these things. So it's not that brands shouldn't talk about being innovative, but it's about helping people understand what they should be doing in a more active way. So a lot of brands are using the command form now. So, for instance, you've got Meto. One of their values is move fast.  

22:25: Sarah Robb 

You know, it's direct to people, it's telling them to do something, but it's also explaining how they're going to be innovative, rather than saying innovative. Uber talk about innovation. But they don't say innovative. They say one of their values is, see the forest and the trees. And their point there is that if you just focus on the smallest details as well as the big picture, you know, you can get compounding innovation happening. And then Airbnb, one of theirs is be a serial entrepreneur. Cereal, spelt like breakfast cereal, which makes you stop and think and requires them to tell a story, and it requires you to understand the story as an employer.  

23:01: Sarah Robb 

But it's all about how they came to be and how, you know, it's a fascinating story, but fundamentally, it's that story of being innovative, always changing, always adapting, and that's how they want people to act. So it's more common now the world's best brands are using sort of these couple of words, two to three words, rather than just saying innovative in the same way. When you think about answering that why statement, what does good look like? When you answer that? Well, I think a lot of people get very stressed about this word purpose, right? Rather than thinking about how do we answer the question, they go, well, we need a purpose. And you see some brands writing these purpose statements that are completely diverse, void from what they actually do for a living and how they make money.  

23:44: Sarah Robb 

You know, if you're not in business to save the whales, don't write a purpose statement. To say, you know, why we exist is to save the home planet. You know, Patagonia can do that, right? You've got to be careful. And really good answers to why statements are credible. First of all, are authentic to what are you actually doing to make money and not shying away from the fact that you're there to make profit, but really talking about, well, okay, why we exist is to help people and help the different sorts of people. And it doesn't need to be saving the whales, but let's just be honest and credible answering why you exist in a way that's relevant not just to customers, but also to employees.  

24:20: Sarah Robb 

So, for instance, Microsoft answered their why we exist as to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And that, to me, is a really powerful why because it speaks to people at work as much as it speaks to the customers they're serving. And by the way, general organizations at large, it's a more measured approach to answering this question.  

24:44: Rachel Fairley 

You're also more likely to know whether you're actually doing it or not.  

24:46: Sarah Robb 

Oh, well, yes, that's such a good point. It's more measurable.  

24:49: Rachel Fairley 

I mean, that's my anxiety around purpose and visions and things like that is they can be so ethereal and aspirational, sort of. I want to know what the company does for a living, and I want to know why they do it. And I want that to be something that I actually can understand and go, oh, yeah, I can see. Here are the examples.  

25:09: Sarah Robb 

Yeah. Cisco's we build bridges to possible. That was quite a nice way of doing it, because again, it can talk about your career, you can talk about customers. It builds in a distinctive asset of their bridge. There are ways of answering these that aren't this generic. We are here to save the world. That is not credible, that causes you to get called out by customers and employees, but actually is relevant and links to how you make money. I think you see a lot of purpose statements that are so disconnected from the people who you have to get to care about your business for it to grow. And I think the why also must speak to employees. You know, attracting people. It's not just about attracting customers, attracting employees, motivating employees, helping them understand what they're contributing to every day.  

25:57: Sarah Robb 

And that's very powerful part of it, too.  

25:59: Rachel Fairley 

So in the little marketing eco chamber that we both live in, the word de jure seems to be differentiation. I mean, it seems like last time it was all about mass market versus segmentation. Now we're into this sort of differentiation salience debate. What's your perspective on it?  

26:16: Sarah Robb 

I think salience we should park. But salience is easy to mind and mental availability. And again, there are another two little phrases that popped up, and they're useful because they're important. And differentiation is important. Being somewhat different is important for any brand. It is not the be all and end all. You'll see people write differentiate or die. That was the and recently strategy book saying the market only rewards differentiation. And you look into the data and it's not the case. Being different coupled with being relevant, coupled with being salient, that triumvirate of things, as in being somewhat different to everybody else, being highly relevant to the people you're trying to reach, and being easy to buy, that's a power combination.  

27:04: Sarah Robb 

And then meaning being different and being relevant again through like Canton, research has been shown to highly influence pricing power and to be really powerful for a brand. The difference words interesting, because recently there's been this debate of, well, people have understood difference to mean being functionally different. And this is sort of this legacy of another one of these jargon phrases, USP's unique selling proposition. That idea came many years ago around the idea that actually you should have a functional benefit and you should talk about it in your marketing. Like Persil washes clothes whiter. Today, it's highly difficult to be really unique on a functional level, and as soon as you are, then it generally erodes very quickly and someone copies your functional benefit.  

27:56: Sarah Robb 

There's a lovely phrase from the founder of liquid death who talks about, you don't have a brand if you think it's just about functional difference. That's not what brand about. But people still try to have something that's unique about their brand that's on a functional level. So there's difference in that aspect. It's very hard, it's very rare. Often internally you have product teams and you'll know this more than I sort of say, oh, we've come up with this thing. It's really different. And the marketers are sort of pulling their hair out, going, it's not really that different. I think partly because of that, there's a language around now distinctiveness. Now distinctiveness has come about with this notion that you need to look different, you need to stand out, right? It's fundamentally about standing out from a sensorial point of view.  

28:40: Sarah Robb 

You know, most people talk about it visually, but it can also be how you smell, it can be how you sound, right? You know, how your brand identity is projected and how you design around that. And this has come from Jenny Romaniac's books. Building distinctive brand assets and being different in the way that you look, feel and sound is really important because you get noticed. I mean, on the basic level, if you look like everybody else and you're a new entry, you will not be familiar, so you won't get as noticed. It's important because it helps trigger associations so you visually are noticed, you're remembered, you're familiar, and then you can start bolting onto that and association you want to build around the brand. Like imagine an ad for McDonald's and there's a arches, and then it just says, we deliver.  

29:26: Sarah Robb 

I mean, that is a campaign they've put out recently, and that uses distinctive brand assets, which is the arches. And our new message we deliver to fundamentally build these associations in people's brains about what you stand for. So being different from how you stand out, which is now really being called distinctiveness, that's important. And it's been linked in research to better performing brands. Again, through Kantar's work, they also talk about difference as being leadership, so they really break it down further. And other people would disagree, but they say there's sort of three big aspects to being different. One is that functional thing, very hard. Two is looking and sounding and feeling different, very important, easier to do. And the third is just this general perception of sort of standing apart from the category and leading a category in some way.  

30:15: Sarah Robb 

TikTok measure very highly on that, whereas Doritos are different because of their shape and, you know, so there's different ways to be different and you should always try and be different, but that's really all it's about, you know, and it's. And I think people having these huge debates around the meaning of these words. But difference is great as long as it's relevant. And this is the other big part. Right. There was this something on LinkedIn this week about Lick, the paint brand lick. They focused on how are we going to be different when they launched and they created these rectangular paint tins, which were very different. Right. And they stack better on shelves and all these other things. However, the customer experience of that was poor.  

30:54: Sarah Robb 

You know, they couldn't actually get the paint out, the tin, and it was really hard to open, and then people were drilling holes to get the paint out. So they've gone, they've moved away from that element of being different because it's not relevant or helpful to the customer. And so all of this talk about difference is not differentiation for differentiation sake. It has to be in a way that is also relevant to the people you're trying to reach.  

31:19: Rachel Fairley 

Fundamentally, what you are trying to do is to be easy to mind, like to be in somebody's brain when they come shopping and then actually make it easy for them to buy. So many agencies over the years have tried to sell me a sort of first, best, only strategy. And all I've ever thought to myself is, well, even if we're first, best or only, it won't be for long. I can't run with that. I can get out the door with it, but I can't run with it, because unless you are the market leader and the incumbent, you're just. It's not going to be sustainable. And with that, we come all too soon to the end of part one. But we covered a lot. We talked about the thirst for proprietary frameworks that helps make marketing jargontastic.  

32:10: Rachel Fairley 

And then we talked about how to bust that jargon by simply dropping our obsession with terminology and instead make sure we're just answering the big questions around why we exist. We looked at the importance of using natural language that a CEO is comfortable with and the whole organization can get behind. We acknowledged that companies don't have to have a functional difference, it's all about how they can become distinct instead. And we agree, the purpose doesn't have to be holy to be noble. Hey, we're supposed to be making money, right? In part two, we're going to talk about imposter syndrome. Is the jargon making us feel insecure? And what is the solution for us marketing pros?  

32:55: Rachel Fairley 

So unless you've never had a moment where you've doubted your abilities or felt like I don't know what I'm doing, I think you'll love what Sarah has to say in part two. Make sure you're subscribed.  

You've been listening to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalised business books.  

I'm your guest host, Rachel Fairley. Your regular host is Dom Hawes. Nicola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor-McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor and Peter Powell is the scriptwriter.  

Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production.