Thanksgiving

Negative Thanksgiving?

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Is Your Messaging Half Empty or Half Full?
It Might Not Matter, if You do it Right.

My daughter came home with an interesting holiday homework assignment – she had to come up with three ideas for a “Negative Thanksgiving.” Here’s the concept:  Be thankful for something that would otherwise be perceived as a negative by pointing out a positive correlation.

For example, she came up with the following:

  • I’m thankful for Final Exams, because that means school is almost over…
  • I’m thankful for Bad-tasting Medicine, because it helps me feel better…
  • I’m thankful for Waking up to Alarm Clocks, because it means I’m still alive…
  • I’m thankful for Property Taxes, because it means I own a home (OK, that was mine)

You get the point.

Here are a couple relevant examples for you to consider (insert yourself in the first person):

  • I’m thankful for my competitors, because it means I’ve got a product worth competing with.
  • I’m thankful for my customer’s objections, because at least they were paying attention.
  • I’m thankful for Marketing and Sales training binders, because they provide great lumbar support.

What’s the positive in your negatives?

We recently worked with a client in the internet security market who was facing a young, up-start competitor trying to position our client as being too big, inflexible and out of touch.  After engaging us for messaging work, we were able to position the value of being the biggest and turn it into a differentiating advantage.

In the internet security space, your ability to detect potential risks, hazards and threats, and create a solution to prevent them, is significantly enhanced by having the largest network of customers and consumers using your system. Something the smaller competitor lacked.

So, by the end of the workshop, our client was saying (I’m paraphrasing here): “I’m thankful for being the biggest, because in the battle against internet fraud, it’s the size of your network that matters.”

What’s the positive in your perceived negatives? Can you reframe them by attaching them to an even more important customer objective?

Happy Negative Thanksgiving!

– Tim Riesterer, CMO and SVP of Strategic Consulting and Products
on behalf of the entire Corporate Visions Team