Positioning is a generous act. Many of you are familiar with the strategic work of positioning. Positioning involves drawing an XY grid, finding a square, a corner, a quadrant that's under inhabited, and then filling it. Each one of the axes needs to have extremes on it. Cheap, expensive, convenient, hard to use. But what you're seeking to do, if you want to do this work honestly is find axes on your positioning chart where either axis is a good thing. So the thing about cars, if someone walks into a Volvo dealership and says, I'm here to win a big car race, the Volvo dealer should send them down the street to the Ferrari dealership. And if someone walks into a Ferrari dealership and says, I have seven kids and I need to get them to preschool, that person shouldn't try to persuade them to buy an Enzo with a trailer.
They should send them down to the Volvo dealership. What it means to have a position is that you can eagerly and honestly send people to what others think of as your competition. that when a company, a service, a brand owns a position in the marketplace, they're doing it for their customers. And that means you're willing and eager to send people who shouldn't be your customers somewhere else. There isn't a best position. There's simply a useful position. so when you show up with your product or your service the ad the story you're trying to tell to find your smallest viable audience you need to claim it so there's a brand called supreme that makes clothing there's usually a line outside the supreme store in new york city people waiting in line to buy an 80 t-shirt well the first thing you'll notice is they're all wearing clothes There's no naked people in line.
So they're buying a shirt they don't need. And secondly, on their way to Supreme, they passed 20 stores where they could have bought a t-shirt for $10. The position of Supreme isn't, you need a t-shirt, we have a t-shirt. Their position is, for people who view clothing as a sign of status and a certain kind of affiliation, that's what we have. But please, don't come in here and tell us our stuff's too expensive. it's not for you positioning is the generous act of being able to say it's not for you but consider going over there this is the opposite of selling a commodity if you're selling life insurance and your slogan is our life insurance is just like their life insurance you don't have a position you might even have a slogan right you're in good hands or whatever slogan the insurance companies come up with, but you don't have a position.
So the generous act we have in the fast-moving world of social media is to stand for something and not decide to stand for everything. We're going to do a lightning round here. I made these strategy cards that have five million combinations of ideas, and there's a few that I want to share with you and comment on real quickly. The first one is this. Don't play games you can't win. And what I mean by that is you can't out Amazon, Amazon. You can't out Walmart, Walmart. You can't out Apple, Apple. These slots, these positions are taken. But there are lots of things you can do that Amazon can't. Lots of things you can do that Apple can't. Go find one of those things and claim it.
Number two, avoid false proxies. False proxies are easy to measure and distracting. I hope we can agree, it doesn't matter how tall you are, it has nothing to do with whether you're going to be a good president or not. And yet, people in my country keep electing the taller person. Another one, if you're hiring a programmer, it doesn't really matter how fast they can type. There's no correlation between that. I talked to somebody who's building an organization and he confessed the last five people they hired had all been captains of their Ivy League tennis team. This is a bad idea. You're measuring the wrong thing. You're keeping track of something that doesn't matter.
If you run an ad and you're keeping track of clicks, you're making a mistake because we all know how to make clicks go up. And the things you would do to make clicks go up are not the things you're going to be able to do to make your brand do better. Every genre that we pick is a category. Genre does not mean generic. Genre means what do I expect? What does this remind me of? If you're going to make a mystery novel, it needs to have something that feels like a mystery novel because people want to put it into a category. When we show up on social media, tweets look like tweets and Instagram posts look like Instagram posts. But why? Who decided that?
Is it helping us or not helping us to fit into the genre we're in? Does matching the way our website looks compared to their website increase trust or does it get in the way of creating the tension people will need to go forward? A few times I've mentioned tension. Stress is a bad thing. Stress is wanting to go here and there at the same time. Stay and run. Avoid it. But tension, tension is the hard work we do of pulling the rubber band back before we let it go. Tension is FOMO. That when an artist says there's only 10,000 seats and we've already sold 9,000 of them, that gets the last bunch of people off their couch to go out and get seats because they don't want to miss out.
When we show up in a system, when we show up with a product, when we show up with any sort of invitation, just the fact that we showed up creates tension. Apple announces there's a new kind of MacBook. Well, how will I feel that I don't have the newest one anymore? Tension is created. And I guess the last one I want to share with you, particularly for business to business selling is the question, what will I tell my friends? What will I tell my boss? If you go to someone in business and you don't give them a good story to tell their boss about why they bought something, the only story that's left is, I did what we did last time or I got the same thing but cheaper.
That's how you're going to get a no or worse a maybe. That when you show up to build a network effect, to try to get an app to spread or to try to get a community of people on base with you. The person who's looking at that ad, once they feel the tension of what they should do or not do, they ask themselves the question, what will I tell my friends? What will I tell my spouse? If you can't give them the story or help them construct a story that works for them, they're not going to engage with you. So I've been ranting. I hope the rants have been useful. But in short, the arc of what we talked about is simple and difficult. It requires you to raise your hand and be on the hook, to make your assertions out loud, to determine what you're going to measure and what you're going to intentionally ignore.
In the book business, in my case, it wasn't easy to persuade my publishers, I'm not going to look at the New York Times bestseller list because it's gamed and because it's measuring the wrong things. That I'm not going to read my one-star reviews on Amazon because I learned nothing from doing that. That when we make choices about where we're going to show up in social media, we're also making choices about where we're not going to show up. Can you announce what those choices are and why? And can you be a professional and lean in to what you stand for? We seek the smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience. And that small group, they're members of a tribe, a group of people who seek more connection, who want to stand with each other and for something, and who want to go somewhere.
And so when we show up to do our work as an ad professional, as an ad creative, as a creative strategist, we don't get to skip all these things and just say to the client, what kind of ad do you want? We don't get to say, isn't the ad funny or well filmed? No one cares. We're not trying to win awards. We're trying to win trust. We're trying to win connection. We're trying to win the benefit of the doubt. That doesn't happen because we're being authentic. It happens because we're being consistent, because we are creating tension, because we're building a bridge from here to there because we're creating culture. People like us do things like this.
So I'm encouraging you to pursue this creative vision of, here, I made this. I made this. I'm on the hook to make a change happen. If you're not here to make a change, we probably don't need to spend our time and money with you. But if you are here to make a change, let's be clear about what that change is. Who's it for? What's it for? What's worth doing? And who would miss us if we were gone? The technology that's been built since I got my first job is stunning. Everyone has their own media channel. Anyone with a good enough idea can reach a billion people on earth for free in a day. But at the same time, you can't buy your way out of this problem the way we could in the old days.
You can't buy huge amounts of wholesale attention and then hope a miracle happens. It's incremental. It grows over time. It's something that we earn. It's not something that we do. So I like to finish my rants by saying, go make a ruckus. And what I mean by that is simple. Not go spam people, go hustle people, go interrupt people. We're better than that. What it means to make a ruckus is to find a place where you would be missed if you didn't show up, to create possibility, to engage with people in a way they want to be engaged with, and to make things better. Because the truth is, change is going to happen whether we want it or not. But better, better is possible.
Thanks for the work you do. Thanks for spending the time with me. Go make a ruckus.