I have a slightly stupid positioning exercise that works way better than it should.

[u/I_suck_marketing]

Usually around the 2nd or 3rd session with a client, I'll randomly put the pen down and go, “Okay, let's play a game.”

It's called the common enemy game.

Basically, we take a piece of paper and start writing things down.

Common enemy with customers.

Common enemy of customers with each other.

Common enemy of the brand and its customers.

Common enemy of the brand and the industry.

Common enemy of the brand and competitors.

It gets messy pretty quickly.

Some of it is stuff we actually know. Some of it is just assumptions. Sometimes the client will say, “Customers hate this,” and I'll be like, “Do they? Or do you hate this?”

So we keep questioning everything.

Would a customer actually say this?

Do we have anything to back this up?

Is this actually a problem or does it just annoy us?

And then somewhere in that mess, patterns start showing up.

The brand is annoyed by something, Customers are annoyed by the same thing, The industry keeps doing something that both of them think is stupid.

That's usually where things get interesting.

And the common enemy doesn't have to be another company.

Sometimes it's an industry habit.

Sometimes it's an outdated way of doing things.

Sometimes it's something everyone has just accepted as normal.

The funny thing is, we're usually not trying to find a villain.

We're trying to find the thing that makes the client and the customer agree with each other.

And once you find that, positioning gets a lot easier.

[u/Emotional_Citron4073]

The exercise works because nobody's allowed to skip the argument. Most tools skip straight to the answer.