☀️ A summer positioning story

I’m writing this from the middle of a heat wave. The kind where you plan your day around which room the sun hits when, and any serious thinking has to happen before 10 AM.

And since positioning has my full attention right now, with The Positioning Setup starting this Monday, my half-melting brain went straight into a summer story about differentiation.

It involves a swimsuit.

Earlier this summer, an ad found me: swimwear made from a fabric that lets the sun through, for less visible tan lines. I had no idea this product existed. But once I knew it did, I was fairly sure more than one brand would be making it. So I went looking, found four or five of them, compared, and bought from a Portuguese brand called Coração Bobo.

Here’s what sold me. The suits are handmade in Portugal, by a company where women run every stage from design to sewing. The prints are exclusive, developed with local artists.

Not one of those reasons has anything to do with tan lines.

It’s a tidy miniature of how differentiation works in the wild. And it plays out differently from the advice most of us carry around: find the one thing that makes you different, the claim no competitor can make. I’ve watched marketers (myself included) hunt that unicorn claim for months and come back empty. Like the unicorn, the one-of-a-kind claim is mostly fictional. The real-world specimen tends to be less flattering: a rhinoceros, more or less.

My swimsuit money was won by a structure with two levels, an anchor and a differentiation mix. Each plays its own role, and you need to work on both.

The anchor, or why I was looking at all

Coração Bobo entered my consideration for exactly one reason: they solve the tan-line problem. That was the job I went shopping for. If their website had led with “handmade by women in Portugal,” it would have washed right over me. Lovely, sure. I wasn’t looking for that.

Anthony Pierri and Rob Kaminski of Fletch, positioning specialists whose worksheet I often use in client work, call this the anchor: the thing already in your buyer’s head that your positioning attaches to. A job they’re hiring for. A pain they’ve named. A category they know. It answers the only question a stranger is asking: what is this, and is it the thing I need?

The anchor is where positioning starts, and its function is admission. It gets you found, considered, shortlisted. It rarely wins the sale on its own, because everyone else on the shortlist got there by matching the same job.

Anchors come with a catch, though: you need one people are already looking for, even if you don’t love it. I’m not a fan of calling myself a consultant, with all the baggage that word drags along. I use it anyway, because when a company needs outside help with positioning, “consultant” is what they go looking for. So that’s the box I show up in.

The box gets me found, though it has never once won me a client. Which brings us to level two.

The mix, or why they got my money

Four or five brands passed my anchor test. The choice happened entirely on what was stacked on top.

Look at that stack again: handmade in Portugal, women running the whole process, local artists. Every element is available to other brands. European-made swimwear exists. Women-founded companies exist. Artist collaborations exist. If differentiation required a claim no one else can make, Coração Bobo would have zero.

What they have instead is a rare combination, aimed at a specific person. Someone who wants the tan-through function, would rather support European manufacturing, likes knowing who made her clothes, and enjoys a print that didn’t come out of a stock library. That’s me, apparently. The aggregate did the choosing.

My own brand runs on the same logic. I can’t claim to be the only positioning and messaging consultant; there are thousands of us, and plenty are very good. The combination is another story: I do the senior strategy work and the hands-on making myself, and I teach your team to run the system after I step away.

Strategists exist. Makers exist. Teachers exist. One person being all three is what clients pick me for. And if your buyer is a committee rather than one swimsuit shopper, the logic holds: the stack has to read true to everyone with a veto, which mostly means fewer, sturdier claims.

What keeps a mix from turning into soup

If a combination differentiates, why stop at three claims? Why not stack ten?

Watch what Coração Bobo left out. Nowhere do they claim the longest-lasting fabric, the lowest price, the fastest shipping. All plausible claims. All aimed at somebody else.

A mix differentiates when it passes three filters:

• Each claim is true, and you can prove it. The atelier, the women, the artists: receipts exist for all of it. None of it is dazzling on its own, and it doesn’t need to be.
• The combination is rare. Any single element can be copied by next season. The full stack can’t be copied credibly.
• Everything points at the same buyer. The mix reads like a description of one person’s values, and that person recognizes herself in it.

Three to five claims is the ceiling I hold client work to, roughly what anyone can hold in mind about a brand at once. Past that, every new claim dilutes the ones already there. Adding more feels like safety from the inside. From the outside, it reads like soup.

And if this sounds like it contradicts the “say one thing” school of positioning, look closer at that school’s favorite tool. Branding veteran Marty Neumeier’s onliness statement, the classic exercise in radical focus, runs: the only [category] that [does A and B and C] for [these people]. A combination, wearing a one-sentence coat.

***

The work of differentiation, then, is two choices. Pick the anchor that gets you onto the right shortlists. Then build the small, true, pointed mix that wins the choice once you’re there.

Worth asking about your own brand: can you name both levels? The job that gets you considered, and the three to five things that, together, make you the obvious pick for your person.

Check your answers against evidence, too: the words buyers arrive with, and the reasons clients give when they tell you why they picked you. If either comes out fuzzy, that’s an hour well spent this week. Heat wave permitting.

The mix matters,

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

B2B LinkedIn Strategy: Your Complete Guide to Building Credibility, Authority, and Buyer Trust | A thorough guide on LinkedIn strategy. I like two points in particular: credibility compounds when employees post in their own voice instead of copy-pasting brand language, and measurement should sort metrics by the job they do, from saves and profile visits up to pipeline notes, instead of stopping at surface reactions.

Content Effort: The Google Ranking Feature Nobody Talks About | Google’s leaked API contains a contentEffort score, an LLM-based estimate of the work visible on a page. The useful part for your content work: effort is judged by the evidence on the final page (original facts, real curation, high-effort media), which is a solid bar for any AI-assisted workflow.

The hardest part of content hasn’t gotten any easier | Jimmy Daly shipped a few hundred AI-assisted pieces this summer and concluded the bottleneck hasn’t moved: vetting ideas and editing ruthlessly. His borrowed Gladwell line says it best: a writer earns the paycheck by spotting what’s interesting in the transcript.

👀 Two for fun

This gallery of people looking up | Le Monde’s photo picks from last week’s solar eclipse. The best is that the cameras focused on the awestruck faces, not just the sky.

This mellow dose of Bowie | A recent find: Seu Jorge covering David Bowie in Portuguese, from Wes Anderson’s Life Aquatic. All the Bowie energy, at a fraction of the tempo.

🐈 Weekly cat

“Flowers and screams” should be a recognized love language type.