When Everybody Zigs, ZAG
by Craig Schlanser
August 15, 2007In an age of me-too products and instant communications, keeping up with the competition is no longer a winning strategy. Today you have to out-position, out-maneuver, and out-design the competition. In this interview, Marty Neumeier (author of The Brand Gap and ZAG) and Josh Levine of the branding firm, Neutron, discuss why being different—really different—is essential to business success.
Schlanser : Marty, in your new book ZAG you discuss the concept of radical differentiation, saying that it's about finding a whole new market space you can own and defend. How is your brand of differentiation any different from what Trout and Ries have been espousing for years with their work on positioning?
Neumeier : There's no doubt we're all standing on the shoulders of Trout and Ries. They believed that in a competitive marketplace, winning brands were not those that got there first, but those that got into people's heads first. My point is that the marketplace is no longer merely competitive—it's hypercompetitive. The accelerating speed of business and increasing market clutter are demanding more than ordinary differentiation. Their demanding radical differentiation. When everyone zigs, you have to zag.
Schlanser : How is that different than positioning?
Neumeier : It's positioning with a vengeance. It's positioning powered by a differentiated business model and communicated with differentiated messaging. It's differentiation top to bottom and side to side. The big change in business today is that customers now have an unprecedented range of choices. As a result, brands are no longer controlled by companies, but by customers. A new tagline or a new ad campaign is an insufficient response to what customers really want. What they want is tribal meaning.
Schlanser : What do you mean by tribal meaning?
Levine : With so many buying options out there, customers are able to reach for something higher. It used to be that differentiation was applied mainly to features: "Buy Morton Salt because it contains magnesium carbonate and the others don't." Later it was applied to benefits: "Buy our salt because it doesn't clump in humid weather—when it rains it pours." Then it was applied to experiences: "Buy our salt for hassle-free cooking." Today it's about the tribe: "Buy our salt and join our tribe of American home chefs."
The person buying a Harley-Davidson is making a statement—he's a member of the modern American cowboy tribe. The customer of Charles Schwab joins the DIY investor tribe. The subscriber of The Economist joins the global intelligentsia tribe. Brands have to offer more than functional benefits today. They have to connect at the level of personal identity. We go into this concept during Zagweek.
Schlanser : How is Zagweek structured, and what can participants expect to get from it?
Neumeier : Zagweek is three one-day workshops, one on THE BRAND GAP, one on ZAG, and one on addressing your own branding challenge, which we call the Jumpstart Lab. In the Jumpstart Lab, you come out with a differentiated market position and basic messaging elements for your own company or brand.
The BRAND GAP workshop gives you an overview of the how brands are built, and covers the five disciplines of differentiation, collaboration, innovation, validation, and cultivation. Participants come away with an enlightened view the whole brand process, from business strategy to customer delight.
ZAG workshop drills down into the first discipline of branding, differentiation. It makes a case that our super-cluttered marketplace demands radical differentiation. Today a brand has to be different—REALLY different—to create a sustainable business. People come away with a good understanding of the 17-step process of finding, designing, and renewing differentiation.
The Jumpstart Lab is a chance to apply the 17 steps to your own company, and get the feedback of other participants as you work through the issues. At the end you come out with a positioning strategy and some basic messaging elements. The workshop is designed to answer the question, "How do the ZAG principles apply to my industry, to my business?"
Schlanser : You just cited some consumer brands. Do the principles in ZAG and THE BRAND GAP apply to B2B brands as well?
Neumeier : They do, because our definition of brand is "a person's gut feeling about a service, product, or company." When we talk about a brand, we're really talking about a commercial reputation. Does a B2B company have a reputation? You bet it does. You could argue that a reputation is even more important in B2B than it is in consumer. It's just that building a B2B reputation requires investment in different touchpoints. Instead of investing heavily in advertising, say, a B2B company might invest in messaging, or sales training, or event design. It's a weight shift rather than a different discipline.
Schlanser : What do you find are the biggest barriers in getting companies to zag?
Levine : Easy—the "fear of stupid". Companies won't invest in a new idea because it's never been done before and are afraid it might fail. Because zagging, by definition, requires companies to be really different, the fear of public failure is palpable. I'm sure you're going to ask how we get our clients to overcome this fear, right? We use the good/different chart. Basically, this a way to use pattern-matching to assess the potential value of any brand element you can prototype—a business idea, product, experience, piece of communication, whatever. You expose the prototype to a potential customer, then map the feedback to a previous success pattern, rather than taking it at face value. We talk about this in our ZAG workshop.
Schlanser : What type of professional would benefit most from Zagweek?
Levine : We tend to get business owners, marketing directors, strategists, designers from a range of disciplines, research people, CEOs of small to medium companies, advertising people—basically, anybody who has some responsibility for branding. We've yet to get a CEO from a major corporation, but that only reinforces our belief that branding is not the top-down activity, but a bottom-up or middle-out activity. Revolutions don't start at the top.
Schlanser : It strikes me that everyone already knows they need to zag. The question, really, is how. Can you really demonstrate that in a workshop?
Neumeier : That depends on the participants. We've noticed that some people are really good at turning raw principles into finished plans. You give them an idea like the "integrated marketing team," and off they go to build one. Or you make a statement like "you can't be a leader by following a leader," and the next thing you know their reinventing their business models. Other people, though, will ask for more details. They'll want a recipe, a complete set of steps. Still other people will want those steps broken down into more steps. Everybody learns differently.
What I try to do in my books is to boil concepts down into principles, which is why I call the books "whiteboard overviews." When concepts are simplified, you can see how they fit together, and you have a framework for making decisions about your own special situation. The more specific the instructions, they fewer situations they'll apply to. The workshops, however, add detail to the principles, and let people internalize them with hands-on exercises. THE BRAND GAP workshop is the most generalized; ZAG is more prescriptive; and the ZAG Jumpstart Lab actually walks people through the process of designing their own ZAG—they come away with workable brand direction and what we call a "trueline."
Schlanser : What's a trueline?
Levine : It's a tagline before it becomes a tagline. It's the one true thing you can say about your brand that's both differentiating and compelling. For example, you could say that Southwest lets you fly almost anywhere in the U.S. for less than it costs to drive. You could then translate that to "You're now free to move about the country." To craft a trueline, you can start with what we call an "onliness" statement: Our brand is the only _______ that _______. Onliness is the test of differentiation.
Schlanser : To come full circle, a trueline sounds a lot like what Trout and Ries would call a positioning statement. What's the difference?
Neumeier : A positioning statement, or a value proposition, to use the conventional term, is useful but inadequate in an era of brand-to-brand combat. A trueline is more than strategic—it acts as a bridge between strategy and creativity. It's a positioning statement with creative legs. A trueline has the capacity to release enormous corporate energy, and to make a powerful emotional connection with customers. It's not just Trout and Ries. It's Trout and Ries and Rogers and Hart. The music is everything.
ABOUT THE SUBJECTS: Marty Neumeier is president of Neutron LLC, a San Francisco-based firm specializing in brand collaboration. He is a frequent speaker in design, brand, and creative collaboration. You can reach him at marty@neutronllc.com.
Josh Levine has earned degrees in both graphic design and engineering psychology. His current position as "epiphany engineer" at Neutron allows him to pursue his passion for communication design, business strategy and creative collaboration. You can reach him at marty@neutronllc.com.
To learn how to apply the principles of ZAG, don't miss ZAGWEEK Philadelphia: a three day workshop (from September 18-20th) on increasing your branding effectiveness. For event details and registration info., go to www.zagweek.com.
