I emptied a notebook out over the kitchen table on Sunday, the grid-paper kind I fill about every four months, and read the whole thing start to finish with a cold Ovation pour-over next to me. Meeting scrawl, a budget I lost an argument about, one page that just says WHY in enormous letters. Somewhere in there ten actual lessons had accumulated without my permission.
They were not the lessons I would have predicted. They mostly came from watching brands get squeezed, because pressure is the only honest diagnostic anyone gets.
You do not learn what a brand is during a good year, you learn it during a bad one, when every stated value has to compete with margin and only one of them wins.
So, in order.
One. Positioning is what you cut first. Whatever survives the budget meeting is the real strategy, whatever the deck says.
Two. Speed beats polish when people are anxious. A plain sentence posted today outperforms a beautiful campaign that ships in six weeks.
Three. Nobody is confused about your logo. They are confused about why you exist. Those get treated as the same brief and they are not.
Four. Internal audiences are audiences. Your staff read the campaign before your customers do, and they know whether it is true.
Five. Trader Joe's spends nothing on the things we bill the most hours for and it does not appear to hurt them. Sit with that longer than is comfortable.
Six. Consistency compounds and novelty does not. The brands I envied all year were doing something boring, at volume, for the fourth year running.
Seven. A tagline is not a strategy. I have watched a room spend nine weeks on seven words while the actual positioning question sat untouched on slide four.
Eight. Customers forgive price increases and do not forgive tone. Raise the price, keep the voice, and almost nothing happens.
Nine. Oatly proved that a personality can be a moat. Everyone read that as permission to be quirky. It was permission to have a point of view, which is much harder and much rarer.
Ten. The brief is the work. A bad brief cannot be rescued downstream by anyone, at any budget, ever.
Positioning is what you cut first.
None of these are clever. I keep noticing that the things I actually believe about this job get less clever every year, and more useful. The clever version was mostly for pitch rooms, and I have sat in enough pitch rooms to know what that reflex costs.
Truffles walked across the notebook while I was reading it and settled directly on lesson six, which is either a comment on my priorities or a warm patch of sun. Barnaby stayed on the windowsill, unmoved by all of it, as usual.