Using Communications as the Great Unifier

It’s Monday night of Thanksgiving week. I’m fresh off of multiple content deliverables for four clients and still a little tired from my travels and our amazing Friendsgiving event. But most importantly: I’m hungry, which is why, when I was tasked with writing about brands and all things positioning for which I’m grateful, the first thing I thought of was…you guessed it…Waffle House. 

Now that I live in the SouthEast, I see them everywhere. There’s one across the street from my apartment and, not 150 yards from it, is a decrepit Cracker Barrel and an IHOP that always seems to be empty every time I drive by. These observations all coalesced around a single realization as I sat down to write a blog on brands and messaging: Cracker Barrel just spent $700 million to learn what Waffle House has known since 1955—that consistency beats confusion every single time.

You know exactly what you’re getting when you walk into a Waffle House at 2 a.m. or 2 p.m. (it’s probably closer to 2 a.m. if we’re all being honest with ourselves). 

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for brands that understand a fundamental truth: Positioning isn’t what you say about yourself—it’s what sticks in someone’s brain when they’re not thinking about you at all. And for the record, I’m not thinking of Waffle House all the time, but I can damn well cite my go-to order by memory upon request (All-Star Special, eggs over-easy, side of cheesy hashbrowns, extra crispy please and thank you). 

Now, with that random thought out of the way, we can dive in on some actually “nutritious” insights this Thanksgiving week. 

I’m grateful for the brands willing to put in the work

Many B2B tech companies treat research that informs brand positioning like a formality. Quick stakeholder survey, competitive scan, ship it. Red Fan’s exhaustive discovery process reveals why that’s backwards: You can’t position what you don’t deeply understand.

Companies will spend millions on product development but balk at budgets that allow for deep market research and brand messaging that translate into tangible outputs like sales narratives and enabled content, new websites optimized for zero click and contactless conversion, demand-gen or investor assets that light the road toward the next business milestone. They then wonder why their “revolutionary” platform sounds identical to their five direct competitors.

I’m grateful for sales, marketing & C-suite teams that speak different dialects of the same brand language

I’ve watched this movie a hundred times: Marketing builds beautiful messaging architecture while sales keeps using the same tired pitch deck from 2019. The CMO talks transformation. Sales talks features. The website promises revolution. The demo shows buttons.

The breakdown happens because nobody owns the connective tissue. The best brand positioning work I’ve seen and been a part of forces alignment by design—you literally can’t move forward until everyone’s working from the same playbook. That means every stakeholder from investor relations to customer success operates from the same core narrative, refracted through their specific lens.

I’m grateful for geometry that illustrates how I think about brand messaging

The average B2B purchase now involves six to 10 stakeholders—and up to 20 for complex enterprise deals. Your economic buyer cares about ROI. Your technical evaluator wants architecture details. Your end user needs workflow improvements. Your executive sponsor thinks in strategic initiatives, ROI and the bottom line.

That doesn’t even account for additional layers like generational purchasing patterns. Gen Z—the first truly digital-native generation—is now entering the workforce (as a likely end user of a B2B tech product), and 86% of them use AI daily to research vendors before ever talking to sales. They report to millennial managers who now make up 59% of B2B tech buyers and are using generative AI to build vendor shortlists in minutes instead of weeks without ever actually clicking on your website or filling out a contact form. They’re championing the purchase to an in-person-preferred, relationship-driven baby boomer executive who still wants the 45-page slide deck and a complimentary steak dinner from your sales team before signing anything.

If your messaging can’t survive a gauntlet like this one, it was never messaging to begin with.

Here’s an example: A recent playbook we developed for an infrastructure technology client maps messaging across four distinct vertical markets—then segments each across three to five audiences accounting for factors like stakeholder sophistication, buying influence and technical literacy. That’s not overkill. That’s understanding that a facilities manager and a CFO need completely different stories about the same technology platform.

Without this level of detail, messaging effectively becomes like trying to fix a dysfunctional Thanksgiving family dinner by adding more side dishes. They might taste good, but they’re not solving anything.

I’m grateful for platforms over features

I thank the messaging gods everyday that we’re finally moving past feature worship. I’m sorry, but your API isn’t interesting. Your dashboard isn’t revolutionary. Your AI tools might be impressive, but so are everyone else’s.

What matters is the platform story—the ecosystem you’re building, the transformation you enable, the specific problem you solve better than anyone else. The shift from products to platforms isn’t just semantic. It’s fundamental. Products compete on features. Platforms compete on outcomes and value.

The LinkedIn B2B Institute’s research proves what we’ve suspected all along: Only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market at any given time. The other 95% are lurking, talking to your existing customers (not you) at conferences, forming opinions based on brand reputation, values alignment and executive visibility, building mental availability, creating shortlists. By the time they’re ready to buy, 92% purchase from their “Day One” list—the vendors they already had in mind before searching. If your brand and platform stories aren’t memorable before a prospect formally starts a search with intent to purchase, you’ve already lost.

I’m not a math guy so I can’t believe I’m saying this: I’m grateful for numbers

Let’s talk ROI, because everything else is just poetry.

Research from Les Binet and Peter Field shows that 60% of marketing’s payback comes from long-term brand building—yet most companies over-invest in short-term activations that decay almost immediately. The brands playing the long game are building the mental availability that determines whether they make the “Day One list“—the vendors buyers already have in mind before they start searching. And I’ll state it again because of how dominant of a stat this is: 92% of the time, B2B buyers purchase from that list.

Add to that the fact that 71% of B2B buyers are now millennials and Gen Z. They don’t want PDFs. They don’t want to “schedule a demo.” They want to self-serve, compare pricing and capabilities transparently and understand your value immediately. Your messaging better work in a TikTok attention span or you’re done.

The grateful truth

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for brands that invest in the unglamorous work of positioning. The ones conducting 20 stakeholder interviews and surveying 100 customers when five would be “enough” for others. The ones mapping message architecture across a dozen or more different audience parameters. The ones who understand that in a world where everyone claims to be “innovative” and “industry-leading,” the best differentiation is often just specificity.

I’m grateful for Waffle House’s stubborn consistency. For brands that know exactly who they are—and more importantly, who they’re not. For companies willing to spend six months on positioning before spending six figures on campaigns.

Most of all, I’m grateful for the Cracker Barrel catastrophe. Because nothing proves the value of thoughtful positioning quite like watching someone set $700 million on fire in a week.

Your brand positioning isn’t just messaging. It’s not just marketing. It’s the strategic foundation that determines whether you’re building compound returns or compound confusion. And unlike Cracker Barrel’s rebrand, you can’t just ctrl+z your way out of bad positioning once it’s in the market.

The difference between brands we remember and brands we forget isn’t budget. It’s the willingness to do the deep work before the visible work.

Happy Thanksgiving. May your turkey be tender, your positioning clear, your messaging prismatic and your research exhaustive.