Every American Indian tribe (and every Texan and Mexican) feared the Comanches in the 1800s.

Their rise to dominance is in part a story of positioning strategy. I’m just finishing Sam Gwynne’s recent book, Empire of the Summer Moon – a riveting narrative on the rise and fall of one of the most feared tribes in American history. Only the Sioux on the northern plains come close to the Comanches’ ferocity.

The Comanches’ ascent can be traced clearly to their expertise in raising, breaking, and riding horses. Over the course of about 200 years, the tribe developed a specialty in handling horses. Consequently, the Comanches made their living by hunting buffalo and warring against other tribes (stealing their horses) and, eventually, killing the white man. The tribe had no patience for subsistence farming.

At a young age, Comanche boys had a horse to ride. By the time they were in their teens, a young brave could sweep up off the ground a wounded comrade at full gallop. For years, the Comanches raided and slaughtered the frontier settlers, including the Army and even the early Texas Rangers. For example, when chasing and then engaging the Comanches after a raid on a settlement, pursing soldiers would dismount their plodding Army horses to shoot their muskets. It took a minute or so to reload the rifle.

But the Comanches would stay on their mustangs, which were much leaner and faster than the those of the soldiers, and charge into a line of standing soldiers. By the time it took to reload a musket, a Comanche brave could shoot a dozen or more arrows while hanging on to the side of a horse at breakneck speed.

Eventually, the inexorable advance of the white man pushed out the Comanches. The white man slowly learned to ride more like a Comanche warrior – on a fast horse. And then came the game-changer: the Walker Colt, the repeating revolver. Then it was the white man’s turn to slaughter the Indians.

The simple point is that power comes from being really good at something. Ergo, one thing. Consequently, you develop a reputation (and a messaging strategy) for that one thing.

The specialist position is really the only tenable marketing strategy in today’s explosion of organizations, services, and products.

The only thing I despise more than car payments is paying for car repairs.

For the past 17 years, I’ve taken my cars (vans, trucks, etc) to a small garage run by two brothers. The other day when I picked up my truck, the younger brother (who is the boss) had on a shirt with the words: “Specialists in Imports.”

Years ago, my brother-in-law referred me to the garage, saying, “Mello Motors is really good at imports.” That resonated with me since, at the time, my wife drove a Toyota Camry.

I remember, though, thinking, “How will the garage do with my Buick?”

Of course, the Mello brothers had no problem with an American engine.

They had positioned themselves as experts in one thing: imports. It worked. The Mello boys ended up servicing our Camry and our Buick … and every car since.

This is an important point about messaging: You always message specifically to your position. Mello Motors advertised as a specialist in imports. That doesn’t mean the garage won’t service domestic cars.

You always grow by focusing your messaging on your one thing – while still providing services in other areas. The only exception is if you want to lay claim to the generalist position (which is the death knell for most organizations in today’s highly specialized environment).

I’ve found that in general, most organizations fight the strategy to specialize, but it’s the only way to stand out.

Bread Poets is a bakery in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Its growth is a fattening symbol of the post-Atkins-diet economy.

In 10 years, the bakery has baked and sold more than 100 different kinds of breads, though today only 42 kinds of bread are actively made at various times of year. For example, the bakery occasionally makes “challah” bread, which is part of the Jewish tradition.

Bread Poets bread is comfort bread, food for hearty folks, the kind of carbs that make you feel warm about life, especially during the long, bitter winters of North Dakota. You need lots of sweaters. Not just for the cold but for the layers of lard that you’ll need to cover up once summer comes – around July.

The bakery, by the way, also makes cookies and scones.

I’m originally from Bismarck. In early March, I yanked my youngest son out of second grade for a week-long visit to my parents. It was 15 degrees below zero the night Cory and I drove into my parents driveway. Without the wind chill. It was March 11.

The next morning, my dad cut me a slice of cinnamon bread from the Bread Poets bakery. I had another two slices. I’d not heard of the bakery before, even though I travel to the Dakotas once or twice a year. I thought the bread was a new phenomenon.

I recently talked with Jon Lee, the owner, who said it took an additional four years prior to starting the business in 1998 for him to perfect his first set of recipes. Jon said, “It was about a four-year process to not only to learn how to make bread, but how to brand the business, and build the business model from scratch.”

Essentially, it took a total of 14 years to become an overnight success, at least in the Bismarck area.

Now Jon plans to sell Bread Poet franchises. He hasn’t sold one yet, but my guess is that just like it took 14 years to perfect the original bakery, it will take some time to learn the art of franchising. A bakery and a franchising company are two completely different types of businesses.

But he’ll succeed. If you look at the logo of Bread Poets, it’s in the same design family as that of Panera Bread, a popular franchise where I live in the Chicago area. However, Jon is after a much different kind of franchise owner than is the person who might ante up for a Panera Bread.

In establishing the franchise, Jon has done the hard work of capturing the essence of the brand. Bread Poets is not so much about the bread, but about what baking bread means to an owner-operator of a franchise.

The promise of a Bread Poet franchise is the promise of a deeply satisfying lifestyle. It’s about creating a tangible product in an intangible world, something you can see and touch and smell and taste. It’s about the satisfaction that comes from making people smile (and much more thick, I might add). It’s about an integrated life that is one part craft and one part home. It’s as much “being” a franchise owner as it is owning a franchse. It’s really about becoming the Bread Poet in your community. Trust me, North Dakotans are not a deeply reflective lot, but there’s something profoundly contemplative in the Bread Poets brand.

See for yourself at www.breadpoets.com.

I often write about how to rise above the noise in how you communciate with your clients or customers. This time, I thought I’d give you 4 ways to train your folks to ignore you:

1. Think along the lines of 1966: “We just need to send something out, it doesn’t matter what.” You would have thought this thinking would have died around the time of the Bay of Pigs debacle. It hasn’t.

2. Everything is important. That is, you refuse to prioritize what you want to communicate to your constitutency, so every message has the same sense of urgency. Or, rather, every message has the same non-urgency.

3. Use the web like it’s still 1996. Ignore more than 10 years of knowledge about how and why people use the web. A good example of this is adding a blog to your web site when you have nothing interesting to say. Gulp.

4. Expect branding to generate sales. Branding and positioning can give you focus. But you still have to do something. You still have to create a marketing plan. Hopefully, your new branding strategy will translate into DOING something differently. Branding alone, without a strategy to do something new, is an excercise in narcissism. Branding is a word that means nothing these days.

There’s a corny saying that if you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes. Most organizations and businesses are not the leader in their category. So how do you market your university or service if in fact you are going up against Goliath day after day?

The answer is the art and science of positioning. It’s marketing strategy that works. Positioning is even more relevant today than when Jack Trout coined the word in 1969.

In a recent interview with CZ President Dave Goetz, Jack Trout, the man behind the theory of positioning and co-author of the marketing classic Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, talks about what marketing must to do to compete in a world of overblown expectations, fierce competition, and commodity services and products.

B&S: What, if anything, has changed over the past thirty years in marketing strategy?

Jack Trout: Essentially, the only thing that has changed is the level of competition. Competition today is intense. It’s what I call the “tyranny of choice.” There is now so much choice that if you make a mistake, your competitors quickly get your business, and you don’t get it back.

It’s the General Motors problem. They made a lot of mistakes and market share continues to drop.

Has your thinking about positioning changed since you coined the phrase?

Jack Trout: No, not at all. My stance on positioning has become more important in the scheme of things because of the level of competition. My first article in 1969 about positioning pointed essentially to the “me-too-marketplace.” The concept of positioning was necessary because of the arrival of more and more competitors saying, “Me too.” My premise was based on the rise of competition.

But did I realize in 1969 what it would be like in 2006? Not at all. At that point, there wasn’t global competition.

Are there a limited number of positions?

Jack Trout: Remember, we’re talking about positioning as a science. It’s the science of the mind—psychology. One of the things we talk about in positioning is the Rule of Seven. In other words, in any category there are no more than seven brand names that anybody can remember, and those are only high interest categories. Harvard psychologists figured out that generally the finite number of brands that stick in people’s heads is seven.

But there’s also the law of duality. If you look at every category, only two brands eventually rise to the top. It’s Coke and Pepsi, Kodak and Fuji. The remaining brands—3, 4, 5, 6, and 7—are working in a fairly small market share.