News
Retail Marketer Adopts SMS Strategy from Political Parties: Calls Competitor "Dumpy Bullseye

DENVER — In what industry experts are calling "a shocking progression of marketing desperation," local retail chain SuperMart has abandoned traditional SMS marketing approaches in favor of strategies stolen from political campaign playbooks, complete with fearmongering, name-calling, and unrelenting levels of message frequency.

Janice Booth, SuperMart's recently promoted Chief Engagement Officer, made the pivot after a growing disinterest in conventional text messages like "15% off this weekend!" and "New arrivals just dropped!"

"Our engagement rates were plummeting faster than our employee morale," explained Booth while anxiously checking her phone's notification stream. "Then I received nine texts in three hours from a political campaign asking for $7, and I thought, 'This is genius. They're absolutely relentless.'"

SuperMart's new approach includes bombarding customers with up to 17 messages daily, each employing increasingly desperate rhetoric. Most controversial among the new tactics is Booth’s decision to refer to competitor Target as "Dumpy Bullseye" and describing Walmart as "Radical Price-Slashers destroying retail values."

"We're simply meeting consumers where they are," Booth defended, "which is apparently in a constant state of retail pandemonium.”

Customer Max Rodriguez shared examples of recent messages he received from SuperMart:

The campaign reached its peak yesterday when customers received a message reading: "THIS IS NOT A DRILL. SuperMart has been told we MUST end our patriotic 30% off home goods sale at MIDNIGHT or the Deep Retail State wins! Rush to SuperMart NOW to protect your shopping rights!"

Despite widespread customer complaints, Booth points to a increase in metrics. "Our unsubscribe rate has skyrocketed 800%, but those who remain are spending 3% more, probably out of sheer terror," she noted while drafting a message comparing a competitor's loyalty program to authoritarian regimes.

Marketing expert Trevor McSimmons expressed concerns. "We've seen retail borrow strategies before, but this level of manufactured outrage over throw pillows and frozen pizza is unprecedented," he said. “Though I wouldn't be surprised if every retailer is doing this by Black Friday."

At press time, SuperMart was testing a new emergency broadcast system that would allow them to send SMS alerts to customers who had unsubscribed, citing a "retail national interest" clause buried on page 47 of their terms of service.

Max Rodriguez was forced to get a new phone number after receiving multiple 3am messages reading: "SLEEPY Max - while you sleep, Dumpy Bullseye is SLASHING PRICES! Wake up! SuperMart is open 24/7 and YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU TO SHOP! #RetailPatriot"

Editorial
The Positioning Purgatory: The Corporate Identity Crisis

From the Mind of B.F. Spaulding

Publisher's Note: The following essay was reconstructed from a series of voice memos Mr. Spaulding sent during what he described as "a three-day positioning workshop that produced 47 slides and zero positions." I’ve cleaned up some language, removed two extended bourbon reviews and one surprisingly detailed critique of hotel conference room chair designs.

A tale as old as time. It typically begins with an executive announcing, "We need to update our positioning!" with the same urgent tone one might use to declare "The building is on fire!" or "They're out of bourbon at the bar!"

This grand proclamation is usually followed by a series of increasingly desperate “workshops” where the marketing team attempt to extract some semblance of concept from the executives who view their company the way proud but delusional parents view their unremarkable children — as simultaneously the best at everything and utterly unique, despite evidence to the contrary.

I was once trapped in positioning purgatory with a rather large technology company. The new CEO insisted that we were talking about the company all wrong and that we were simultaneously "enterprise-grade but startup-nimble," "premium but affordable," and "revolutionary but proven."

I needed bourbon before noon. I make no apologies for this.

Let me share a fundamental truth I've learned after three decades in this business: If your company can't explain what it is in a sentence that doesn't require an Oxford comma, you don't have positioning. You have a paragraph-length identity crisis usually mixed with stock photography.

[Publisher's Note: We’ve removed the 17-minute gap filled only with what sounds like ice cubes clinking against glass, light cursing, and the occasional deep sighs.]

The problem isn't that companies don't understand the importance of positioning. It's that they aren't willing to make the sacrifices positioning requires. Positioning, at its core, is about choosing what you're NOT as much as what you ARE. It's about having the courage to say, “We aren’t for everyone, and that's the point."

But try telling that to a founder who believes their SaaS platform will revolutionize everything from enterprise resource planning to pet grooming. I once suggested to a CEO that perhaps they shouldn't list "small local businesses" as a target market since their product started at $50,000 per month. He looked at me as if I'd suggested selling the company for magic beans. "But my nephew runs a food truck, and he said our dashboard looks cool," was his actual response. There was not enough bourbon for that meeting.

The most successful positioning work I've ever done involved locking executives in a room (metaphorically, though I've considered the literal approach) and forcing them to complete this sentence: "We are the ONLY company that _______." If the blank requires more than 10 words or includes the phrase "end-to-end solution," we start over, and I pour another drink.

The blank should never contain the words "disruptive," "revolutionary," “game changing,” "synergy," or "leverage." If it does, drink twice and try again.

The gap between how companies talk about themselves and how customers perceive them is less a gap and more the Grand Canyon, except filled with buzzwords instead of geological wonders.

[Publisher's Note: The next portion was sent at 2:17 AM from what location data suggests was a bar.]

Here's what your customers actually want to know: What do you do? Who is it for? Why is it different? Why should I care? If your positioning can't answer these four questions without using terms that would make a buzzword bingo card combust, you've failed.

The worst positioning statements sound like they were created by asking ChatGPT to combine a TED Talk with a LinkedIn influencer post¹. They're so desperate to sound important that they forget to be clear. I once worked with a company whose official positioning was "Empowering visionary enterprises to leverage transformational insights through our proprietary ecosystem of connected intelligence." After three bourbons, I still couldn't tell you what they sold. (It was accounting software.)

Good positioning isn't actually that complicated. It's just hard. Hard because it requires making choices. Hard because it demands clarity. Hard because it means disappointing the VP of Strategic Whatever who really wanted his pet project mentioned in the company tagline.

Executives are afraid of missing out on potential customers. "If we say we're just for enterprise, what about all those mid-market opportunities?" they wail, ignoring the fact that their product costs more than the GDP of a small island nation and requires implementation support that would make NASA blush.

The reality? Vague positioning doesn't expand your market; it shrinks it. When you try to speak to everyone, you appeal to no one.

So what's the solution to this positioning paralysis? It comes down to three things:

First, positioning is a choice, not a consensus. If everyone in your executive team is completely happy with your positioning, it's probably too safe and vanilla to be effective. Good positioning should make at least one executive uncomfortable because it doesn’t align with their perception of the market.

Second, positioning should be built on truth, not aspiration. Yes, you want to be the leading AI-powered platform revolutionizing the industry with blockchain and quantum computing. But if your current product is a slightly better meeting scheduler with a machine learning model you borrowed from Stack Overflow, perhaps you should start there.

Third, it must pass the janitor test. If you can't explain your positioning to the janitor (or barista, or taxi driver) and have them understand what you do and for whom, it's not clear enough. I find an uber driver at 4am is often more sensible than most marketing departments.

Companies most resistant to clear positioning are the ones who need it most. They're companies in identity crisis, companies who've lost sight of what made them special in the first place, or companies led by people so terrified of missing out that they refuse to focus on anything at all.

If your company can't decide what it wants to be when it grows up, you don't have a positioning problem. You might have a leadership problem. And no amount of workshopping, word-smithing, or market analysis will fix that. Though bourbon helps. Not with fixing it — just with making the pain go away for a while.

B.F. Spaulding is the Editor-in-Chief of Marketing Burnout. He maintains a collection of contradictory positioning statements from now-defunct companies and can be found ubering home from a bar after a long day positioning himself closer to the door because the meeting was killing his soul.

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