I know that you can hear his erudite, near-whisper of of a BBC-trained voice narrating a documentary about meerkats and the jackals that hunt them. Imagine Sir David, now 100, saying something like:

I don't want to turn agency positioning into a hunter and hunted kind of metaphor because it isn't, but it's important to remember that just like the jackal, your positioning is a reaction to the market. If you are focused on trying to create positioning that makes you a category of one, I'm not sure that's possible in the marketing agency world. And to be honest, if you are a category of one you have got to do a ton of market education to allow the market to realize your uniqueness.

Positioning isn't the things you say about yourself, but rather how you say the things that the market will hear.

Great positioning is like a bright beacon above the landscape - everybody looking in that direction can see it. But unbelievably, marketing and creative agencies are terrible at making bright beacons for themselves.

I did a little searching, and I found an article by the B2B Institute that says B2B marketing is A SEA OF SAMENESS. And I did a little more digging and found articles from eConsultancy, WordStream & AgencyAnalytics showing overuse of now-meaningless common phrases like “extension of your team”, “data driven”, “customer-centric”, etc.

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I can't speak for every agency, but of the hundreds that I have worked with, there are are a few things that happen on the regular:

But here's the thing, unlike meerkats and jackals, brands and agencies want to meet each other. They create mutually beneficial relationships. But the common vernacular makes every agency look the same - it's as if every agency is called Bob, and you never know which one someone is referring to because they are all called Bob.

In short, the meerkats don't differentiate between jackals. They only see the teeth.

Because shitty agencies have fucked it up for the rest of us, an agency is sometimes a jackal trespassing in meerkatland. You might be seen as a predator.

Positioning starts with really understanding the meerkats. You’ve got to know what the meerkats pay attention to, what they value, what they are afraid of, and what makes them feel comfortable.

Your ability to express that you understand what the meerkats need & value is what changes the moonlight glinting off your jackal fangs into a beacon that shows safe harbor.

It’s probably time for Fake David Attenborough to share with you a different fact about meerkats- they live in families. Not all families of meerkats are the same. There are some families that have dozens of pups, and then there are others that have only a few, so their needs are different. So your understanding of meerkats, that thing that turns the moonlight glint off your fangs into a beacon, is really specific. You can't address the needs of all meerkat families. You can only address the needs of meerkats with ten or more pups, or no pups, or only two pups - you simply can't make them all attracted to you.

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You know, we talk a lot about vibes, vision, and values here, and these are the things about your agency that are most true. But some of the things that define your VVV are broad.

An agency I recently worked with has an obsessive need to maintain client relationships way beyond the scope of work. That this agency cares and wants to ensure that the client gets ongoing benefit from the work is a value that would appeal to a broad, non-specific audience.

So we needed to make that value specific to the audience they serve. They are in the EDU space - so we dug deep into the language of their meerkats and discovered that EDU clients felt abandoned when their agencies finished a scope of work and disappeared. So we took that value of my client and turned it into something that resonated with the meerkats they wanted to engage with…

As part of their outreach, marketing, and sales process, they’ve positioned themselves as architects of foundational element on which an educational institution can build its future. In parallel, they talk about this foundational element as part of their responsibility to help the institution steward their investment to its fullest. This helps them speak the long-term language that echoes and mirrors the language of their clients:

This makes them a really bright beacon in a sea of web development & platform integration sameness which attracts institutions that are thinking not about the rapidly changing future, but rather the solidity, dignity, and importance of their mission to the future of the communities they serve.

A bright beacon signals to the world that you understand, respect, value & are a full participant in a specific part of the market. It shows that you are a welcoming and safe place for your specific part of the market to take chances and try new things.

Great agency positioning provides more benefit than just showing the meerkats that you are not a jackal. Agency positioning helps cut through the noise of your direct and indirect competition.

Every agency I know has a competitive agency that they run into frequently and perceive them as their direct competition. Consequently, they believe that their slice of the market is comparing them to their direct competitor. That doesn't happen all that often, but as I said earlier, meerkats don't differentiate amongst jackals. They just see the teeth.

Direct competitive positioning is something like saying, "I'm a jackal, but my teeth don't hurt as much." Positioning is not about defending yourself against another agency in as much as it is about creating the beacon that signals safe harbor. But you have other competitors that you are probably less aware of:

Positioning tacitly addresses these competitors by showing your depth of meerkat insight. Positioning excavates your expertise, resiliency, insight, and gives you permission to take action that no meerkat would take on their own.

Positioning that is based in the understanding of what your market segment wants, needs, believes, trusts, and fears, allows them to gravitate towards you. At the same time it give them permission to accelerate towards you because the beacon is bright, the harbor is clear, and there's no chance of them running aground.

The sea of sameness is a jackal that's hunting your agency. DemandOS is the system that helps your agency create a safe harbor beacon & powers a go-to-market motion that shines light in the places where your prospects have always been worried that there's been a jackal lying in wait. DemandOS helps you become the safe harbor in which you and your prospects can create foundational relationships.

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