Portland's bid is due Thursday. So is everybody else's. Amazon put out the request for proposals on September 7 and gave the entire country six weeks to explain, in writing, what kind of place it is.
Tucson tried to ship Jeff Bezos a twenty-one foot cactus. Stonecrest, Georgia offered to carve off a piece of itself and name it Amazon. New Jersey put seven billion dollars of incentives on the table. A mayor in Kansas City wrote a thousand Amazon product reviews.
Those are the memorable ones. The rest are the story.
I have read a dozen of the public pitch packages now and they are the same document. Talented workforce. World class universities. Transit investment. Quality of life. Diverse and creative culture. Direct flights. Cost of living lower than the coasts. Somebody in each city sat down to describe what makes their home unlike anywhere else and produced a page that could be about anywhere.
A positioning statement written to win an evaluation is not positioning, it is a bid, and a bid gets scored on the number at the bottom.
That is not a failure of the writers. It is what the brief does. Amazon published its criteria and the criteria are metro population, transit, talent pipeline, and incentives. When the audience tells you exactly what the scorecard is, everyone optimizes to the scorecard and the identity language becomes decoration on a spreadsheet. Watch which sections got lawyers and which sections got adjectives.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and the pattern is identical when a client runs a competitive review. The RFP asks nine questions, every agency answers the nine questions, and the winner is chosen on a tenth thing nobody wrote down. Writing to a scorecard makes you legible. It does not make you preferred.
Portland has an actual answer here, which is what stings. Not the livability boilerplate, the real one: a city that has spent forty years being suspicious of growth it did not choose. That is a genuine position. It is also not something you put in a document asking fifty thousand jobs to move here, so it went in the drawer, and what got sent is the same page as Columbus.
Writing to a scorecard makes you legible. It does not make you preferred.
Barnaby has picked the third shelf of the bookcase over a heated bed that cost sixty dollars. He did not evaluate them. He did not fill anything out. He simply preferred one, for reasons no scorecard would have caught, which is the only kind of preference that ever lasts.