Karaoke on Tuesday, the sticky-floored place in Southeast, and a man in a very good shirt sang Africa. Perfect pitch. Perfect runs. Perfect breath control. He got polite applause and everyone went back to their drinks.
Then a woman got up and sang Total Eclipse of the Heart about a half step flat for five and a half minutes, and the entire bar sang it with her. Strangers with their arms out. The host, who calls everyone baby, got visibly emotional near the end.
Same room. Same sound system. One of them was better.
Function gets you considered. Feeling gets you chosen.
This is the least popular sentence I say in a positioning workshop, because the people in that room have usually spent eighteen months making the product genuinely better and they want that to be the story. It is not the story. It is the ticket into the room where the story happens.
Pepsi won the blind taste test. Repeatedly, decisively, for years. Coke has the shelf. Stumptown is not objectively the best coffee in Portland and I will argue with nobody about that, because being the best coffee in Portland was never what Stumptown was doing. Salt & Straw has a line down the block in February, in the rain, and not one person in that line is comparing butterfat percentages.
Here is the part that gets lost. Emotion is not decoration applied after the functional work is finished. It is a claim about what kind of person you are while you are using the thing. Patagonia sells a jacket that keeps rain off you, which every jacket does, and a self-image of someone who repairs what they own, which almost nothing else does.
So the strategic question is not how do we communicate our advantages. Every competitor has a list of advantages and every list runs to roughly the same length, in roughly the same font, on roughly the same slide.
The question is what a person feels about themselves in the three seconds after choosing you.
To be clear, none of this is permission to be bad. Function is table stakes, and table stakes are called that because you cannot sit down without them. Nobody loves a brand that fails them at the thing it exists to do. They just do not love a brand only because it succeeds.
Function is table stakes, and table stakes are called that because you cannot sit down without them.
I sang Landslide, badly, and with total commitment. Three people sang along, which is three more than the man in the good shirt got, and I have thought about that ratio all week.