Tropicana lost 20% of unit sales in 6 weeks with better design.

January 8, 2009. New cartons hit shelves. Cleaner type, a fresh glass of juice, $35M behind the launch. The work won every room it was shown in. Then it hit the aisle, and shoppers walked right past their own juice. Some assumed it was a house brand. Some reached for Minute Maid. By February 23 the old carton was back.

Nothing was wrong with Tropicana. Category leader, north of $700M in that line. No crisis, no drift. A company tired of looking at its own packaging, mistaking that feeling for a strategic problem.

Episode 13 is the last of the season - When is the right itme to rebrand.

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t's 2009 and Old Spice is dying. Your grandfather's brand. Retailers pulling it off the shelf.

So the agency finds one thing: about 60% of body wash is bought by women. They build an ad aimed at men that sells what women want their men to smell like. Super Bowl weekend, 2010. Number one men's body wash in America.

They never touched the soap.

They changed the slot it occupies in your head. Same product, new position, and that is the whole game.

Episode 12 of Positioning to Win. The four corners every position sits on, four ways to move yours, and why Tylenol never argued it was better than aspirin.

Positioning is not an aesthetic. It's surgery on the business. A new coat of paint does not move a building.

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Most stalled brands are solving the wrong problem.

They pour marketing money on a branding problem. Or brand money on a marketing problem. Then wonder why nothing moves.

Episode 11 of Position to Win is about telling the two apart.

Diagnose before you spend.

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Snickers owns hunger.
Red Bull owns exhaustion.
Corona owns the beach.

They trained you for years until the feeling itself does the selling.

That's brand recall.

Ep 10 of Position To Win.

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A female guppy always picks the brightest male.
Until two males are equally bright.
Then she picks the one the other females already chose.

You do this too. So does every customer you have.

Episode 9 of Position to Win is about persuasion, and why most brands only use a third of it.

Aristotle named the whole system 2,400 years ago. Ethos, character and trust. Pathos, emotion. Logos, proof and logic. Most founders live in logos. They build the better product, show the better numbers, and wonder why the market still picks someone else.

We get into the guppy and social proof, the precise-number trick that makes a claim feel more true, and the move most brands get backwards. They cast themselves as the hero of the story. But your customer is already the hero of theirs.

Your job is to be the guide.

Make your customer the hero. Be the guide worth following.

New episode out now. Link in comments.

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Brand Archetypes along with the process I run:

Opportunity. Which archetype roles your category already owns, and which are still open.

Character. The open one you can credibly live.

Counterweight. The secondary that keeps the primary honest.

Expression: Expressed, suppressed, or distorted.

Naming your archetype is the easy part. Building the company to live it is the challenge. Episode 8.

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Episode 7 of Position to Win. Brand voice. Belief, voice, tone. Why most brands argue about the top of the pyramid and never build the bottom. Why voice fails in the middle. Why Mailchimp's $12B exit was almost entirely about the sentences.

Voice is strategy.

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Brand identity runs far wider than the logo.

Most of the time someone meets your brand, they are looking at the color, the type, the photography, the way things are spaced on a page. The logo is one member of the cast. The whole system is what people actually feel.

Episode 6 is a walk through that system: the marks, the type, the imagery, the spacing, and the small rules that let people recognize you from a thousand feet with the logo nowhere in sight. We have some fun with the hidden ones (the FedEx arrow, the Amazon smile, the bear tucked in the Toblerone mountain), talk about why identity tends to break at the system and not the logo, and why, if you are already spending real money on marketing, a tight identity quietly makes every dollar work harder.

The logos you remember all hide something worth finding. Start with the idea worth hiding. Subliminal Logos aren't made by accident but designed with the narrative in mind.

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