The host at the karaoke bar in Southeast Portland, the one who calls everyone baby, introduced me last Tuesday as our resident brand lady. I have been going to that bar since 2013. Back then he introduced me as Halley, and when people at the bar asked what I did for work I said marketing, because brand strategist required a follow-up paragraph and nobody wanted it.
Nobody asks for the paragraph anymore. My dentist has a positioning statement. My barista has a brand.
Which is the story of the decade in one sentence, and it is worth being honest about how it happened, because it did not happen because those of us doing the work got better at it.
The 2010s did not make brand strategy more powerful. They made it more common, and those are not the same thing.
Three things did it. One, direct-to-consumer economics. When Warby Parker and Dollar Shave Club and Glossier cut the retailer out, brand stopped being the layer on top of the product and became the entire moat. Unilever paid a billion dollars for a razor subscription in 2016, and every board in America read that number as a valuation of voice.
Two, the platforms. Instagram and Twitter turned every company into a publisher that ships daily, which meant somebody had to decide what the company sounds like on an ordinary Tuesday. Voice went from a page in the guidelines to a full-time job. Three, the money caught up. Brand equity showed up in acquisition multiples often enough that finance stopped filing it under decoration.
Here is the cost. When a discipline goes universal it gets flattened into vocabulary. Positioning is sacrifice, deciding out loud who you are not for, and that idea barely survived the decade intact. It was quietly swapped for purpose statements, which are easier to write, better received in the room, and commit you to nothing. Patagonia can tell you what it refuses to sell. Most of the brands quoting Patagonia in pitch decks cannot finish that sentence.
I do not want the old days back. It was lonelier, the budgets were worse, and the work was not better. But the job for the next ten years is not evangelism. We won that. The job is putting the teeth back in.
Positioning is sacrifice, deciding out loud who you are not for, and that idea barely survived the decade intact.
I sang Landslide on Tuesday, badly and with total commitment, and the host called me baby and meant it. Truffles and Barnaby were asleep on the radiator when I got home, entirely unmoved by ten years of anything. Portland in January does not care what decade it is either. The rain has excellent positioning and has never once revised it.