BRAND POSITIONING: BRAND BUILDING IS BORING. FORGET GROWTH HACKING.

​I would love to start this article with a quote by Al Ries in The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, in which he specifically speaks about the Law of Acceleration:

A fad is a wave in the ocean, a trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little. Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long term. A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn’t last long enough to do a company much good. Furthermore, a company often tends to gear up as if a fad were a trend. As a result, the company is often stuck with a lot of staff, expensive manufacturing facilities, and distribution networks […] When the fad disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock.

And I would associate this quote with the one that describes the Law of Consistency in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries:

A brand is not built overnight.
Success is measured in decades, not years.

Brand building is boring.

It takes time.

It is grounded on three principles that must work together:

1. Patience
2. Methodology
3. Discipline

It takes a lot of patience to be perceived as the best solution to a specific problem.

It takes a lot of methodology to be perceived as the best solution to a specific problem.

It takes a lot of discipline to have the methodology that, together with patience, will lead you (maybe) to be perceived as the best solution to a specific problem for a long time.

It surprises me that many start-ups, especially in the tech arena, do not have any single person in charge of a consistent marketing strategy focused primarily on increasing the value perception of the product.

Many founders are so centred on the belief of their revolutionary technology or service that they seem to be too busy to sell the idea of their revolution.

The French Revolution didn’t happen because one day a few people woke up deciding to reverse the course of history. It was the result of decades of intellectual work oriented towards shaping the ideas into a specific direction, which was convincing enough people that things could be not just different but much better.

Those intellectuals didn’t sell the barricades or the 14th of July.

They sold the idea behind them.

A Revolution is a moment sustained by a period.

However, the French Revolution could be considered a fad.

Indeed, right after it, we had the black days of the Robespierre dictatorship in opposition to the chaos generated to shift the political order from absolutism to constitutionalism.


What was successful was the trend: the idea of constitutionalism that consequently led to modern democracies, benefitting many.

Brand building is boring.

It takes decades to shape someone else’s idea.

It takes decades to shape the thinking of the large number of people you want to turn into an additional source of profit.

It takes time…

...and it’s not free…

Marketing costs.

You do not play games with marketing.

Actually, I am very surprised that twenty-somethings who have founded a company and hope to be the next Steve Jobs are looking for a Growth Hacker to escalate their brand new business by way of some viral campaign.

Indeed, Steve Jobs's example properly represents how hard the road of success might be.

There is no growth hacking.

There is patience that meets opportunity.

Between patience and opportunity there is hard and unconditional work.

The fact that founders of start-ups are looking for a growth hacker shows that the entire company (starting from the CEO) has been sold on the idea of a get rich quick scheme.

They want to get rich without all the time that hard work will take to lead the company into a flourishing, bright era.

They want to skip the pain of getting outstanding results.

Because it isn’t as much fun as the whole idea of being an entrepreneur.

Owning a company isn’t cool at all.

Big villas and nice yachts don’t buy themselves.

Entrepreneurship is a 24-hour game played 7 days a week involving all the dimensions of your life—even your personal life— if you truly want to succeed.

There are no shortcuts.

Brand building is boring.

It takes time.

I have identified a key indicator which predicts whether a new company (or an existing one) is going to fail badly and sooner than expected.

I have named it the Ro. Li. Indicator © and it is based on two pillars:

1. Creativity
2. Split test

Although I am not at all opposed to creativity and split tests when they are used and not abused, I can clearly see that in the present business arena they are over inflated.

What does the Ro. Li. Indicator © say about it?

It states that the more that business founders are creativity-oriented and continuously split test without any criteria, the more they are unaware of what they are doing, and the higher the probability that the business will fail.

Indeed, being creative is often a diplomatic expression (a euphemism) used to hide two potential problems which can exclude each other or operate together:

1. the unawareness of a structured method (“Let’s try this and see what happens”)
2. the inability of the founder to psychologically stay in the constraints of a structure

In the current culture of instant gratification, it shouldn’t surprise you at all.

The new generation of entrepreneurs has a widespread misconception about entrepreneurship that leads them to believe they can get rid of all the hard work after a couple of years of excitement and sell the entire company for a few million, as if all the investors will be lining up to buy that lifetime opportunity on sales.

Brand building is boring.

And because it is boring, it is sometimes hard to do.

It takes patience, method, and discipline to affirm and repeat the same concept and positioning statements over and over again, to find new roads when the competition tries to invade yours in order to survive first and then consolidate.

Brand building is boring.

But it is worth all the sleepless nights you have had to figure out how to penetrate more strategically in the mind of your audience until you become the "idea virus" they can’t get rid of, until they buy multiple times because of the credibility you represent in a synaptic stimulus of their brains.

Brand building is boring.

Be a trend. Not a fad.