Last Thursday I drove to three grocery stores looking for a client's product. Fred Meyer on Hawthorne, then the Whole Foods in the Pearl, then a New Seasons. The product was in none of them. Two of the three still had the shelf tag up, price and all, with a competitor sitting in the facing.
The next morning that same client asked me whether the positioning needed work.
It did not. The positioning was fine. The positioning was, if anything, the only part of the business currently operating correctly.
This has been the shape of nearly every engagement since last fall. A brand arrives convinced it has a story problem, and three weeks of my time later we find out that containers are sitting off Long Beach, or the distributor quietly stopped reordering in November and nobody noticed because the sales dashboard reports shipments, not shelves.
Most of what gets diagnosed as a brand problem is a distribution problem wearing a brand problem's clothes, and no amount of new messaging will put the product back on the shelf.
So before anyone rewrites a tagline, I make clients answer four questions with evidence instead of memory.
One. Can a real person buy this today, in under five minutes, without calling you? Go try it. Go to the store yourself. Do not send an intern and do not check the website inventory feed, because the feed is lying and you know it.
Two. Where did the last hundred units actually go? Shipped is not sold. Sold into the channel is not sold to a human. If the only number you trust is the one your distributor hands you, you do not have a number.
Three. What is your out of stock rate by location, and who looks at it weekly? If the answer is nobody, that is your finding.
Four. When someone cannot find you, what do they buy instead? That is your competitive set. Not the brands in your deck. The brand physically to your left.
Shipped is not sold. Sold into the channel is not sold to a human.
Liquid Death did not out-story anyone into national accounts. It got the placement, and then the personality made the placement pay. Oatly spent years seeding coffee shops before most people outside Sweden had heard the voice, and the voice landed because the carton was already behind the counter at the place you liked. Availability is not the boring part of brand. Availability is the thing the brand is standing on.
I told the client to spend the next quarter on a broker rather than a rebrand. That is a strange sentence to say out loud when you bill for strategy. It was still true.
Truffles and Barnaby ate on schedule this week, from the same bag, which arrived. That is the entire business, and neither of them is impressed.