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.

In the wide world of the web, how do you ensure that when a consumer hops on a search engine they find you first?

Bruce Philp, branding guru to ING Direct and co-author of The Orange Code says that the answer is differentiation. Here in the third of three interviews, Philp talks about how the Internet has changed brand management–and relinquished control to the consumer.

Is the notion of differentiation irrelevant in a “Google-search” world?

Bruce Philp: Trout and Ries would have been hailed as geniuses if they’d described the concept of positioning about twenty years later than they did. Search is the reason why.

Positioning stipulates that a brand be recognizable as one of a pool of comparable brands, and that this pool is defined by a particular kind of user.

Can you give an example?

We don’t think about Levis as competing with all forms of lower extremity coverage, or even with all kinds of pants. They compete with other blue jeans, and we consider what makes them different in that context.

That generates more powerful differentiation, because it forces relevance. It becomes not just a matter of being different, but to whom and against what set of expectations.

How do you win at a search?

To win at search, a brand absolutely must think first about the tribe it’s selling to (to borrow Godin’s word) and their particular expectations and definition of themselves. That discipline directs effective search strategies, but it also directs focused branding.

It seems impossible to manage how people perceive your brand. Is that true?

I contend that it’s impossible to manage a brand anymore. Brands are no longer taught in a one-way, didactic context like they were in the age of advertising. Instead, they are observed across the full spectrum of their behavior.

In effect, this means that everything a brand does adds to its meaning. That’s because there are so many channels open–including the Internet–and because the social consensus that advertising is the ‘official’ voice of a brand is broken.

What happens if you try to strictly manage your brand?

A brand becomes a totalitarian state with a massive bureaucracy focused on control. It moves slowly because every single tactic is a decision. It’s an unsustainable approach for any brand that has to do business with consumers in a competitive context, when disruption is coming at it faster and faster.

When Google can tell me not only what people have said about the brand in the last days, weeks and months, but what they’re saying right now, it’s hard to imagine that the brand as a fascist state can stand.

What’s the alternative?

Manage a brand from principle. This is the constitutional model I proposed in The Orange Code. Instead of creating a book of rules, we create a declaration of principles. We hire for it, we reward it, we tell the world about it so that we’re held to account. Over time, the organization begins to organically behave according to those principles. They become its culture.

Thus, in a world where everything an organization does accretes to the brand, that entire organization will very naturally get it right most of the time.

It is that time again: college visit season.

This spring my daughter, who is a junior, and I made it to five colleges for overnight campus visits.

A campus visit is no small thing. It involves time off school (and work for mom and dad), travel, and the expense of accommodations. You don’t do them on a whim. And you certainly don’t visit schools that your child is only mildly interested in.

By the time a prospective student visits the campus, that student is a “hot” prospect.

Schools foot a big bill to get them there—purchasing names for search mailings, sending admissions staff to college fairs, conducting email marketing and advertising campaigns, and designing glossy view books. Add to that the expense of the visit weekend itself – more mailings, tours, free meals and tee shirts and Nalgene bottles, and the herculean efforts of admissions staff, administrators, professors, and student ambassadors to make it all happen.

Why leave any element of the visit to chance?

Since my son was searching for his ideal college fit two years ago, I have been a proponent of overnight visits, thinking the best way to get a feel for a campus culture is to experience the campus. But not every school allows overnight visits.

Now I may know why.

Twice now my daughter has been picked up by her student host, brought back to the dorm, and told, “I have to go to the library to study for a big exam tomorrow. You can go and do the stuff they’ve got planned for prospects. Here’s my cell phone number – call me when you want to get back in the room.”

Huh?

You are leaving your hottest prospect to fend for herself for hours on end during a visit that could seal—or break—the deal?

At one school I learned that the student hosts aren’t compensated for their efforts, they aren’t trained, and they don’t even volunteer to be hosts. The admissions office sends them an email telling them they’ll be having a prospective student stay with them.

A prospective student is a potential paying customer – more than $120,000 for four years. A campus host is the closer.

Would you entrust the best leads in your sales pipeline to someone who isn’t ready, willing, and eager to engage in the sales process?

Would you allow your $120,000 prospect to feel lonely, bored, and annoyed during the most critical moments of the sales process?

By Bernice Mirrilees
Account Executive
CZ Marketing

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.

Every fall, my wife and I trek west from Chicago to the Amana Colonies in eastern Iowa, about a three- or four-hour jaunt from our home. This year was our seventeenth year. We started in 1992.

We rendezvous in the Amana Colonies with a couple from Kansas City for a long October weekend. I went to graduate school with the husband, and my wife worked at a Dude Ranch in Colorado with the wife. The couple introduced us about 18 years ago in Denver. Through good times and bad, cancer and job loss and six kids (total), we’ve never missed a fall in eastern Iowa.

The Amana Colonies are a series of villages, originally established in the mid-1800s by German immigrants who had come to the States in the mid 1840s to avoid religious persecution. The Amana Colonies formed one of America’s longest-lived and largest religious communal societies. The community supported itself through farming and the production of wool and calico. The community also made clocks, brewed beer, and made well-crafted products. (The folks at the Amana Colonies are not like the Amish or the Hutterites, who eschew modern comforts.) You’ve probably heard of “Amana Radar Ranges” or other kitchen products; there’s a manufacturing plant in one of the Amana villages, though it is now owned by a conglomerate.

Today, the Amana Colonies is mostly for shopping and eating. My wife and the wife of my friend shop at village shops while he and I play golf, watch college football on TV at the bed-and-breakfast, or attend an Iowa Hawkeye football game in nearby Iowa City. It’s a weekend for slugs.

Over the 17 years, we’ve seen the Amana Colonies morph from a destination place with boutique shops, each with unique inventory, to what it is today: a series of generic shops all owned by the Amana Colonies corporation. That is, when we first started visiting the Colonies in the early to mid-nineties, the shops in the villages were independently owned. My wife said recently, “Each shop was unique. You never knew what you’d find; shopping was a lot of fun.”

But that all changed.

In recent years, as best I can tell, the Amana corporation may have forced out the independent shop owners by not renewing their leases. So, today you still have, for example, many of the kinds of shops that you had in the 1990s, but they all pretty much sell the same thing – what the buyer at the corporation decides is good for all the stores. The creativity is gone. The individuality is gone. The corporation came and made everything bland.

It’s hard to know if the drop in tourist visits to the Amana Colonies preceded the move to standardize the shops or is a consequence of shopping that has become generic.

But the point is still true: Corporation thinking tends to value standardization and efficiency. No doubt, there’s a place for that. But someone needs to fight for creativity, for being unique, for taking risks. That is, if your organization wants to grow.

To read the first part of this interview, click here.

The surest way to fail is trying to be all things to all people. You can’t stake out your brand with a mish-mash of promises and services.

According to Harry Beckwith, author of Selling the Invisible, and You, Inc, you can only be one thing—and there are eight positions of power an organization can choose from. In this follow-up interview, CZ President Dave Goetz asks Beckwith to differentiate the positions and how to pick one that can work for you:

Brand &Strategy: Are there a limited number of positions your organization can possibly have?

Harry Beckwith: I believe there are eight positions of power in any market—and you start by focusing on one:

• Pioneer/Leader vs. Innovator;
• Premium vs. Discount;
• Specialist vs. Generalist; and,
• Performer vs. Service.

What’s the difference between the Pioneer/Leader and the Innovator?

The industry leader is big and well established, whereas the innovator is small and less established. Industry leaders rely on an established image, like “good,” “solid,” or “consistent.” The innovator, on the other hand, can be riskier. Tired of the old way of doing things, they think and execute outside the box. Apple is an excellent example of this—coming in and going after IBM.

What about the difference between the Premium and Discount position?

It’s based on pricing. It’s the difference between Tiffany’s and Target. Regardless of how you’re positioning, you want to be aware of your pricing and what it communicates. But your pricing, in most cases, doesn’t drive your message.

The premium priced position is desirable in a lot of ways because it communicates your brand quickly. The consumer knows what they’re getting, and even if it’s a lot of money, there’s a sense of security in that.

Why is there security?

No one’s going to fire you for choosing the best. And if you’re the best, you’re the one chosen. Take McKinsey Consulting: They’re master of the universe and will come up with a hell of a solution for you—but it’s going to cost you a lot.

There are also arguments for choosing a low-priced brand: “I’ve only got so much money, but I can’t do it myself.” Or, “Yeah, they’re low priced, but they know more about it than we do. They can help us, and it won’t cost us a fortune.” Let’s face it, there’s always a market for the lowest priced web developer, if all you want is something that runs, and it doesn’t matter what the product looks like.

But generally speaking, the Discount provider is not among those stalwart positions.

Is there also a sense of security when you choose a Specialist over a Generalist?

Yes, because a jack-of-all-trades can’t be a master of one. You want somebody who is highly experienced and highly specialized. All other things being equal, the more they know about something, the more they work with it, the more proficient they probably will be.

If you have a detached retina, you don’t want a general M.D. You want a detached retina specialist! There’s a security that goes with that.

When it comes to choosing a Performance or Service position, what must organizations consider?

The Performer is not concerned about a touchy-feely experience but focused on high levels of performance.

On the other hand, the Service position is client-oriented. They may not offer brilliant solutions, but they provide valuable solutions along with a good experience. When organizations focus on service, clients experience a high degree of comfort.

Why then do people choose the Performer?

Because everybody wants the best. Sometimes all we really want is a positively good outcome.

What if the outcome is great but the experience is terrible?

Some people find that the outcome really wasn’t worth it. I think people consistently underestimate how much we value the experience—and how little we value the performance. Often it’s difficult for us even to tell if it was a great performance.

For example, you hire a contractor to redo your slate in your bathroom. You get six different people in to do it. Now, there could be some real differences, but really I don’t know who does the better job. However, I sure know who I felt better working with. If so-and-so screws up, I like working with him because I can tell him, and he’ll fix it—and fix it properly.

We tend to put on our rational hats that values cost-benefit and performance outcomes. In the process, we lose sight of the fact that we’re human beings who like to be respected, like to feel good, and like working with people we can trust.