Gabrielle Coco Chanel is immortalized as the maker of Chanel No 5 and the little black dress. Her personal history is rather grey, but she did leave behind some thoughtful quotes, along with a business that still rakes in around $19 billion a year.
I really like the advice often attributed to her that before leaving the house you should look in the mirror and take one accessory off. The idea being that underdressed is better than overdressed. That is quite an achievement in restraint.
Coco and I have something in common
When I start a consulting engagement I usually receive an avalanche of rich information in response to our proprietary questionnaire. There are decks, case studies, and brochures on how they work, who they work with, what they’ve done, and how they are differentiated, and some proof points.
Trouble is that often there is just too much of it to figure out why you should choose them over everyone else in the consideration set. In fact, their secret sauce – and every profitable or once profitable company has one – might be buried right at the bottom.
Much of the engagement is to work with the client to remove all the fluff to discover the true essence of the brand. Creating a Hofstede onion model, making a brand house, doing a core-surround mapping are all tools – like Coco’s mirror – to remove the unnecessary accessories and reveal a clean, elegant positioning statement. When companies begin, they usually have a clear idea of why customers choose them. Then over the years, services, products, and language accumulate, and no one is quite sure.
For example, an IT services firm says it delivers annual cost savings of $3 million to global enterprises through digital engineering, enterprise platforms, data and AI. That sounds like the kitchen sink thrown at every problem, and $3 million means little without the client’s revenue for context. It is a profitable firm so they must be doing excellent work for their clients – the messaging is just lost in the word cloud. Luckily B2B sales is still reliant on humans and they don’t talk like that. Yet.
Keep removing the ands and you are left with: “We cut global enterprises’ costs.” Add the savings as a share of the client’s revenue and it becomes credible.
AI is the Anti-Coco
With AI, consulting is much harder, actually. Because it is so easy now to generate content, someone in the marketing team just churns out, I hesitate to say it, blah! What you see on LinkedIn is also what is seen in marketing content. It all sounds the same, and nobody remembers any of it.
AI thinks we humans like this puffy, fluffy language. And so do the humans who create it, I guess. (And don’t even get me started on people who edit human written content using AI!)
Reality is that this content is junk for both the AI and human with intent to buy. Coco Chanel popularized fake pearls and mixed them with real ones, but she did it with taste and on purpose. AI does it indiscriminately – there is usually a pearl of knowledge buried in the plastic.
How about a good cup of coffee?
I asked Instinct and Claude where I should go for a good cup of coffee near me. One suggested a Matcha place which also had coffee. Or a cafe that was a 15 minute drive compared to Starbucks which was a 7 minute walk. When queried why it had not suggested Starbucks or Third Wave, it said that it (wrongly) associated good coffee with independent coffee shops, not chains. So I then asked both if they had any data on the coffee that was served in their recommended outlets. It turns out none of these coffee shops had anything on their snazzy websites explaining why their coffee was good, and hardly any review. It was just a bunch of blah. Starbucks did, but was defeated by a review that said the coffee wasn’t hot enough.
Sure, I get it, most people go to a coffee shop for the space, but that’s like a base requirement – they can’t entirely ignore the coffee. If they were paying attention to what they were communicating surely they would invest some thinking in writing about it.
The takeaway: no shop explained why its coffee was good, so AI had nothing to go on. Which brings me to the two lanes.
The Two Lane Marketing Highway
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Here’s what I tell clients – we have to market to AI and to humans. Both consume data digitally but that’s where the similarity ends.
Humans have very limited attention spans so we have to tell them “why choose us” as quickly as possible with as much substance as we can. Once we have secured their interest, we can continue to engage, but at no point can we blather without losing them to the next shiny ad/ping/product.
What about storytelling, did you say? Of course, please do, but again, you have to convince them to stay with your story in the first 3 seconds. Using celebs is often dismissed as lazy marketing, but it does hook the viewers attention!
Ensure that everything ties back to your “why buy me”.
AI has a huge attention span, is happy to read everything. But in terms of actual usage, it is weighted towards data, human reviews and credible third party endorsements. Yup, AI likes organic PR!
So your public information has to consciously cater to both human and non-human audiences.
Chanel your positioning
Whether you sell AI services or coffee, I always tell clients that they have to be able to answer three questions clearly and simply – Who Am I, Why Buy Me, Why Not Buy Someone Else. And then keep removing the “ands” till you are left with an elegant answer that is backed by credible data.
The last question, why not buy someone else, is usually where we spend the most time in a workshop. Once you’ve uncovered the diamond, you can do the wordsmithing and storytelling for the humans and the data story for AI. Credibility is required by both.
So. Are you overdressed?
If your key message has ikigai, shoshin, kintsugi, and sentences full of ands, you know the answer. Remove, remove, remove
As Coco is often quoted as saying, simplicity is the key to elegance.
Have a great weekend!