At karaoke last Tuesday, a man in a Blazers jacket sang Piano Man completely straight. No key change, no ironic distance, no attempt to make it his. He delivered the song exactly the way it was written, and the whole bar sang the chorus back at him without being asked.
The woman before him had attempted Bohemian Rhapsody with genuine ambition, and half the room checked their phones during the opera section.
The host, who calls everyone baby, took the mic back and said that's the job, baby. Give people the thing they came for.
I have been thinking about that all week, mostly because of Joe Biden.
In a primary field of twenty candidates all competing to be the most interesting, the only unclaimed position left is the one nobody wants, which is not interesting.
Positioning is sacrifice. That is the whole discipline, and it is the part clients hate. You do not get to be the innovative one and the safe one and the exciting one, because a brand that claims everything is heard as claiming nothing. Warren sacrificed simplicity for a plan for everything. Sanders sacrificed breadth for a movement. Buttigieg sacrificed experience for newness. Biden has sacrificed novelty, deliberately and at some cost, and what he gets in return is the only promise nobody else can credibly make: by next November it will have been four years of noise, and he is offering its absence.
This is not an endorsement. It is a read of the strategy, and the strategy is more sophisticated than the coverage suggests. Boring in brand terms almost never means dull. It means predictable, and predictability becomes a premium product the moment a category turns chaotic. Southwest sells the absence of surprises. Toyota sells the absence of a repair bill. Tide has spent decades selling the absence of anything happening to your shirt.
Boring in brand terms almost never means dull. It means predictable, and predictability becomes a premium product the moment a category turns chaotic.
The risk is real and worth naming. A boringness position is entirely dependent on the alternative staying exhausting. It gives you nothing to say in a room where everybody is shouting, it does not generate its own coverage, and it collapses the second the audience decides it is bored rather than relieved. Boring brands lose when the category calms down. They also lose when boring reads as tired, which is a distinction of about half a degree.
I sang Total Eclipse of the Heart, badly, with total commitment, and nobody came for that either. But the man in the Blazers jacket had the entire room, and he got it by not trying to surprise a single person in it.