New Seasons on Division, Sunday, holding a basket in the salsa aisle for longer than any adult should. There are maybe fourteen options. I have opinions about approximately none of them. I picked the one in the green tub with the handwritten-looking label because I have seen that green tub before, somewhere, probably, and eleven seconds is all the deliberation that moment gets.
That is the whole purchase decision. Eleven seconds and a color I half recognized.
I thought about the positioning workshops I have sat in this year, where we spent six hours refining a single sentence about why our brand is meaningfully different from the one next to it on the shelf. Six hours. Eleven seconds. The exchange rate is brutal.
Your brand does not lose because a shopper considered your positioning and rejected it. It loses because at the instant of choosing, you were not in the room at all.
This is the argument Byron Sharp has been making for a decade and it still lands like an insult in strategy rooms, because it implies most of what we sell is downstream of something dumber and more mechanical. Mental availability. Being thought of, easily, in the buying situation. Distinctive assets that let a tired person find you without reading anything: the color, the shape, the sound, the mascot, the shelf silhouette.
Look at what actually earns recall. Salt & Straw is a script logo and a line out the door, and you can picture both right now. Liquid Death is a tallboy that looks like beer and reads as a joke you are in on. Oatly writes on the carton like a person who is slightly unwell, and you would recognize that carton at forty feet from behind a stranger. None of these are arguments. They are handles.
Eleven seconds and a color I half recognized.
The uncomfortable part, particularly this year as every performance dashboard gets audited and every budget line gets asked to prove itself: recall is slow, expensive, and hard to attribute. You cannot see it in a weekly report. It shows up as a purchase that a last-click model happily credits to a search ad, which was really just the shopper finding a name that was already in their head.
So my honest advice. Spend less of the workshop on the sentence and more on the assets. Pick a color and refuse to change it for four years. Build one shape somebody could sketch from memory. Then repeat it past the point where your own team is bored, because your team sees it hourly and your buyer sees it twice a year.
Understanding is a luxury. Being remembered is the rent.
Barnaby recognizes the treat bag by sound alone. He has never once needed to know the brand story.