Boxing clever
A post about putting people and brands in boxes.
The perils of being a hapless boxee.
Subtext and subjectivity.
Malicious boxing and cardboard ceilings.
Marking your territory.
Mapping your territory.
Uncommercial.
My ex boss put me in a tightly sealed box marked ‘uncommercial’. No escape was possible. If truth be told, no escape was attempted.
It was my fault, you see. I couldn’t pretend to be interested in timesheets. In fact I called them out as a blight on agency culture. I felt we should be obsessing about people, creativity, and client relationships rather than utilisation and contribution figures. If you get the culture stuff right, the money stuff will surely follow.
These thought crimes made me ideologically incompatible with an agency that was increasingly run by its finance department. I didn’t compute. So into the uncommercial box I went. I went knowingly, willingly in fact. You say box, I say badge of honour and all that. But I wasn’t boxing clever and I paid the price when the grim reaper of redundancy visited again.
A box can be a coffin.
It’s not fair.
No one likes being put in a box. It’s a judgemental process. You feel diminished. It’s almost certainly unfair. People jump to conclusions about you, based on little evidence. Your complex identity is brutally oversimplified based on subjective criteria.
Putting people in boxes isn’t fair, but it’s a fact of life. Putting things in boxes, putting people in boxes, putting brands in boxes, is convenient and therefore inevitable.
Even an ostensibly flattering label on your box can feel like a miscarriage of justice. How should a creative team feel about being put in a box marked, ‘mature & dependable’? It’s a label that makes them (and their jobs) feel safe… but not exciting.
The label on a box carries a subtext that usually serves to undermine its occupants. Sometimes that’s inadvertent. Sometimes it’s deliberate.
There was a time when The Leith Agency was regularly beating London agencies in pitches. We were winning awards that would usually stay in London. Still, Campaign magazine persisted in referring to us as a ‘regional’ agency. I swear they took petty delight in doing it. It was their way of telling us to get back in our box.
Shit sticks to a box and Campaign knew it.
Shit sticks to a beer can too.
Imagine investing millions of pounds in famous creative work and broadcast media to build an apparently impregnable premium position in your category. Now imagine that work being undone by some of your brand’s most loyal customers.
Imagine going from ‘Reassuringly Expensive’ one day to ‘Wife Beater’ the next. Stella Artois knows all about being a hapless boxee.
A box can be a millstone.
Back in your box.
It gets worse. It gets toxic in fact. Labelling someone and putting them in a box can be a malicious act. It’s a method of subjugation.
From what I’ve observed, it’s a behaviour that I mostly associate with men, mostly used against women, and always from a position of insecurity:
‘She lacks gravitas.’
‘She’s too strident.’
‘She’s too sensitive.’
Putting people, especially women, in boxes like this is a form of identity colonialism. It’s a strategy to keep people down, and it works by creating a cardboard ceiling.
It’s discriminatory and disgusting, but it’s also subtle and hard to punish.
A box can be a weapon.
Jockeying for position.
To position a brand you have to put it in a box.
A standard positioning statement defines the audience for a brand, the problem that the brand solves for them, the category that the brand is in, and the brand’s distinctive approach to providing value.
The choice of category (Brand X is a…) is an act of boxing.
Stella Artois is a premium lager.
Phil is a brand strategy consultant.
Sometimes the choice of category is obvious. Sometimes it’s an important strategy decision.
By choosing your category, you’re choosing for your sales and marketing teams and for your customers which box they should put you in. You’re telling them who your competitors are. You’re accepting the category assumptions that they’ll make about your product or service.
This is the stuff of strategy because it involves trade-offs. I sell a consultancy service. Clients in the market for brand strategy need to know that. But I also have to accept the negative baggage that some people attach to the word ‘consultant.’
These are fundamental decisions but they’re often neglected by service brands. A website homepage will tell you that a business ‘connects clients with culture.’ But it won’t bother to tell you that it’s an advertising agency. An agency might feel that its boxing itself in with such a prosaic description. But, without it, it’s confusing the hell out of potential clients who want the simple reassurance that they’re looking in the right place.
A box can be a signpost.
What are you like?
April Dunford, who hates more or less everything about the standard positioning statement, describes positioning as context setting for your product or service.
Appropriate context setting is especially important if your product or service is novel (adjective). Customers can only deal with so much novelty. They need the solid ground of familiarity to buy with confidence.
Context setting is also important if your product is a novel (noun). Authors and publishers know this. Their categories are called genres. And, like it or not, an author has to accept this boxing process. The bookstore needs to know what shelf to put a book on. The industry needs to know which bestseller list a successful book belongs in.
The ideal positioning provides familiarity at a category level to confirm that you’re a valid option, combined with novelty at the product level to make you the best option.
When you choose your category, you put your brand in a box to signal a blend of familiarity and relevance to your customers. A well-chosen category reference anchors your brand in fertile territory.
I use a product called OnePage. It puts itself in a box marked ‘CRM platform.’ Good, that’s what I’m looking for. Tell me more. Ok, well it’s a simple, lightweight, easy-to-use system that’s designed for small (one person) businesses. Bingo! The perfect combination of familiar category and relevant product differentiation for this buyer.
Compare this with Slack. Slack is evasive about its category. Depending on where you look, it’s an ‘AI work management and productivity tool’, it’s an ‘AI-powered platform for work’, or it’s ‘where work happens’. I’m slightly the wiser, but nowhere near wise enough to understand what I’m dealing with on first encounter. It’s all too loose and, well, slack. They haven’t marked their territory. You only know what the product is once you’ve used it. Slack has no anchor. It’s adrift.
A box can be an anchor.
Whose box is it anyway?
The box that my boss put me in was not the box that I’d have chosen for myself. This happens to brands too.
When I talk to my clients’ customers, I find that what they’re buying is seldom the same as what my clients are selling. Sometimes it’s similar. Sometimes it’s profoundly different. Seller and buyers put the brand in different boxes. Brand strategy is about understanding and managing these differences.
A box can be a wake-up call.
You are here.
Boxes are useful when I’m interviewing a client’s customers. I’m working to isolate my client’s irresistible truth, and playing with boxes can help me get there.
I might start by asking these customers how they’d describe my client’s organisation. What does it do? What business is it in?
I might ask them what language they’d use if they were recommending my client to another customer.
Then we play the box game.
Many of my clients are b2b service providers. Their customers are familiar with their competitors. They’ve often bought from and worked with their competitors.
So I ask them to think about my client and their competitors, and tell me what box they’d put each firm in.
Everyone knows how the box game works. They’ve all been boxed. They’ve all done their fair share of boxing. They know that the label on a box has to be pointed and precise. They know that putting brands in boxes involves putting meaningful daylight between them.
They don’t have to name names when it comes to competitors. Just tell me what boxes they and my client belong in.
The result is a mental map of the category from a customer’s perspective. The labels on the boxes might relate to specialisms and niches. They might relate to size of company. They might relate to perceived cost. They might relate to style. Often the market map that results from this kind of boxing exercise will include all of these criteria and more. You can’t format these maps with just two axes.
If I talk to four customers I’ll get four maps. No two will be the same. But they’re telling, both individually and collectively.
Customer-generated box-maps tell a client a lot about their reputation. They tell them what they’re not as well as what they are. They often tell them things they don’t want to know, but absolutely need to. As we’ve seen, boxes can be brutal. That’s what makes them cool for this kind of work.
A box can be your reputation.
So there you have it.
A box can be bad.
A box can be ugly.
A box can be good (or at least useful.)
Maybe try this too: the irresistible truths of Nike and the Sex Pistols.