Michael Campion: We now move from the brand protocols into the three P's positioning, personality, purpose. We're going to start with brand positioning and unpack that for you by dividing positioning into its constituent parts, which are brand world, brand authority, brand essence versus product essence and points of parity versus points of difference. Next up, the brand world. This refers to the sector that the brand is in, or, put another way, it is the particular world that the brand inhabits. So here's Bob, with some examples of how the brand world plays out in practice.

‍Bob Sheard: If you take a brand that FRESHBRITAIN works on, Inov8, they had a strong business in the UK on trail running, but they had a strong business in the States on CrossFit, and so we wasn't clear what their world was. Was it trail running or was it CrossFit? Did CrossFit influence trail running or did trail running influence CrossFit? And really neither was true. But what was true was that their unique proposition that enabled them to inhabit that world was the grip that they had on their footwear.

Their grip enabled their runners to run fiercely down mountains but also to train fiercely on all the multi-pull surfaces that exist in a CrossFit gym. So what that meant is we could occupy a world that we, when we brought those together, which was all terrain, and so we said that their world is all terrain performance and we will inhabit that world. So that brought some real clarity to that proposition. The other one which is famous is Salomon, that they were one of the only brands that occupied the front side of the mountain, so all the Olympic sports in winter sports, but also the backside of the mountain, which was where all the interesting stuff was going on snowboarding, backcountry skiing, freestyle skiing, etc.

And also economically interesting. They were spending multi-millions on people like Herman Meyer, but actually the volume for the sport was happening on the backside and the guys that were representing that volume, that were doing all the interesting descents, you could get them for 30 grand, not 30 million. So it meant that we could slightly change the economic model for Salomon too, but in owning the backside of the mountain and the front side, we could define their world as being mountain sports and mountain sports innovation, and that could bring a high degree of focus to their company. I think one of the you know there have been many brands that have not understood their world or their sector and they're in folklore now. So you know Polaroid, who thought they were instant films rather than instant imagery.

Blockbusters, who thought they were in home movies but literally weren't in the home, and I think it was one that's less thought about, which is all the mail order companies. There were some huge monolithic mail order companies in the 20th century that had all the credit. They had all the warehousing, all the fulfillment, but they also had this obsession with a big printed book. They could have been Amazon. Any one of them could have turned into Amazon. They were there, but they just saw their sector as being mail order and not being the provision of goods and services to the home, and so, had they had a slightly wider sense of who they were, they could have been able to manoeuvre more with more agility. So I think that the world is very important and it's important to future. Prove your perspective of the world. A brand that famously has done this is Dyson. You know, was Dyson a hoover company or is it an airflow company? Is it's world hoovers or is it's world airflow? And very clever, they realized that they were airflow, which took them into new products and into new sectors.

Michael Campion: So, very important that you understand the world you're in.

Yeah, yeah it could have gone Well. Maybe Dyson, they could have been moderately successful if they'd been just a Hoover company, but, as you said, airflow is the way to position it, given that a brand is not necessarily what you say it is. A brand is what they say it is. It's what other people think of you, what's in their subconscious, what's their gut feeling when they see your logo or think about you or use their product. Therefore, when we're trying to think about our position, is it as important to take external counsel as it is to ask people internally what they believe the brand world is?

Bob Sheard: Two brands, the North Face and Timberland, two ostensibly rugged, durable outdoor brands that operate in cold climates, two brands that were worn by New York drug dealers on the corners of the projects when they were selling their drugs in cold weather A warm jacket to keep you warm and hide the drugs, and warm boots to keep you warm so you can stand there for longer. Both products bought from Paragon Sports on West Broadway. Now those two brands became totemic of urban American culture as they migrated from the corners of those streets into hip hop. One of those brands lent into that and one of those brands lent away from that. The North Face saw it happening. They said we're never going to stop exploring. They lent away from it. They bashed in the reflective glow of being adopted by that culture, but they didn't target it. Timberland targeted it and they crashed and burned. So being conscious and aware of the adoption, of how people see you is important, but it's not as important as how you react to it. And the North Face, I think, reacted in the right way, which was to understand their core world is outdoor and outdoor exploration, and they didn't turn away from it. They lent away from the urban adoption, leveraged the economics that that created for them. Timberland lent into it and didn't realize that actually they're not a reflection of that consumer. The consumer was consuming them because they weren't a reflection of them, not because they are so, and that's where they came unstuck.