Are you a Muffin or a Cake?
It’s all in the positioning.
Starbucks has your number. They’ve had it for years.
I mean, not literally. Despite all the woes Starbucks is going through (expensive & bitter coffee, cluttered menus, dated stores, commoditization of the brand), they’re a great lesson in positioning; a lesson that can also be applied to your career.
As someone who has worked with brands their whole life, the art of positioning can be summed up in one word: context
Creating it, sustaining it, or changing it in the eyes of the beholder (i.e., you, me and everyone else).
Consider the humble muffin. Yep, that tennis ball sized breakfast delight that is served in coffee shops the world over.
You know you’re eating a piece of cake, right?
For breakfast?
Yet some of us still do it. And that’s because the Starbuck’s menu marketing team knows a thing or two about creating context.
First, they know that muffins have, over time, been associated with breakfast. They use the accepted context for the time of day when they offer you the product.
Second, they also know that when you throw in a vegetable, like pumpkin, or a fruit like blueberries, they change the context from “looks unhealthy”, too “hmm, must be ok for me to start the day,”. They know that all of us, where possible, like to start the day on the right foot - even if we go downhill from there.
Third, Starbucks seal the context deal with a name, like “Breakfast Protein Muffin ”, to tie the bow of the story we tell ourselves as we peer into the display cabinet.
Time of day.
Ingredients.
Name.
Context.
And this is despite it having twice the calories and more fat and sugar than a packet of their chocolate peanut butter cups.
Amazing.
We are marketed to like this all the time. We don’t pay it much attention, because good marketers piggy back the stories we already tell ourselves.
They slide into the context of our lives.
So what’s The Jolt?
In short, we can all control how we position ourselves when we show up at work; we can change the context. It doesn’t mean changing what we’re made of and who we are, it simply means how we show up to the people we work with.
For example, if your business is under a ton of pressure, you may change your context by suggesting ideas for cost savings versus ways to spend money.
If your project is having challenges, you may change your context by being the person who is more vocal about the direction the project is heading, and be known as someone not afraid to speak the truth.
You can even change your context by walking up to someone in the office you don’t know, and saying a big old friendly hello….so that even people who thought of you as a piece of cold cake, now think of you as a warm and fluffy muffin.
With love and context,