🎧 Play while reading: Backwoods Barbie - Dolly Parton

This week we lost someone special.

But this isn’t the 1,000,000th obituary. Or some mansplained dive into female empowerment.

This is a nod to someone who had masterful game.

Dolly was a positioning legend. Instinctively brilliant.

Most companies would benefit enormously from applying the same principles she did. But they don’t. Because they lack direction, courage, and tenacity.

And they’re not even aware the principles exist. All they see is the output: big blonde hair, Tennessee twang and dazzling rhinestones. However, the input is where all the leverage is. That’s where she had it down.

Don’t be fooled by the exterior.

Dolly Parton wasn't punk in a musical sense. Obviously.

She sang about mountain cabins, heartbreak, coal mines, country churches, small towns and Tennessee. She grew up “dirt poor” in a tiny cabin in the Smoky Mountains and carried Appalachia through her music for the rest of her life.

She was as cuuuuntry as it gets.

But… Dolly was punk.

Punk in the underlying sense.

In other words: a strong sense of who you are, and what you believe, that goes against established expectations. Refusing to become what the status quo wants you to be, even in the face of adversity. And having the conviction to amplify it, with the volume dialled up to 11.

In Dolly’s case, she didn’t look or behave like a female country star was “supposed to”. While the prevailing model still prized a certain wholesomeness and restraint, Dolly deliberately pushed in the other direction.

She was loud where women were expected to be restrained, extravagant where they were expected to be tasteful, and playfully provocative where they were expected to be “proper”. She broke the rules.

People told her the look was too much. That she wouldn’t be taken seriously. That she should tone it down.

She turned it up.

But there’s an important distinction here. She didn’t rebel against country. She rebelled against what country said a country star had to be.

She understood what “female country star” already meant in people’s heads. Then she broke with it in ways that created something new. Not randomly. Not because breaking rules is inherently clever. Dolly was almost absurdly country in plenty of ways. She embraced the category just as enthusiastically as she violated parts of it.

Her contrarianism was productive. The things she rejected were the things that allowed her to create something uniquely valuable. Being different for the sake of being different is not on its own meaningful. Difference only matters when the difference matters to someone.

Which brings us back to the input. The positioning.

Find out who you are

Dolly left us with a line that is among the most beautifully succinct descriptions of positioning ever put into words:

Save that somewhere right now ☝️

Tattoo it on the back of your hand. Tipp-Ex it inside your eyelids. Anywhere you won’t forget it.

Because this is the very core of positioning. Everything else flows from it.

The first four words are doing a lot more work than they appear to be.

Simple question. F*cking difficult answer.

Who really knows who they are? Really? Plenty of people spend their entire lives trying to figure that out… and never do.

Now imagine asking a company that same question. It may have a team, products, features, physical assets, a category, customers, a mission statement, a sense of purpose, a balance sheet, competitors.

But who are they? Really?

At best, most will give you a list of what they do and what they want to achieve. It’s inside-out.

In Dolly’s case, she knew exactly who she was. Where she came from. What she valued. What she liked. What she wasn’t prepared to change for anybody. That was her identity.

But identity alone isn’t positioning.

Finding out who you are comes with two additional conditions.

1. It has to be a unique idea that can occupy a space in people’s minds that nobody else does

2. It has to mean something to someone

You can discover something completely authentic about yourself that nobody values. Or something enormously valuable that is indistinguishable from everybody else. Neither gives you a position in the mind.

Defining who you are as a positioning strategy is as much about who you are to other people as who you are to yourself.

Dolly had both the necessary ingredients.

By being so unapologetically comfortable in her own skin, she made other people feel more comfortable in theirs.

You could be poor. Weird. Loud. Overdressed. Underdressed. Too country. Too much. Not enough. You didn’t have to sand yourself down to earn your place in the world.

That was the idea at the heart of Dolly, served in a country package.

Put verbally, her positioning idea was “Backwoods Barbie”.

Which are not my words, they are hers.

A walking contradiction that somehow made perfect sense. Appalachia and glamour. Humble roots and outrageous ambition. Country authenticity and larger-than-life artifice. She didn’t resolve those contradictions to make herself easier for the world to understand. She owned them.

Do it on purpose

There’s another lesson buried in that contradiction. Authentic doesn’t mean unconstructed.

The hair was fake. The nails were fake. Much of the surface was deliberately artificial. But that didn’t mean Dolly was fake.

If anything, all that construction made the real thing underneath more visible. Authenticity doesn’t require you to show up completely untouched and unmanufactured. Brands are constructed by definition. The question is whether what you construct expresses something real in people’s minds. A mental angle. Dolly used artifice to articulate the identity of her roots in a manner that achieved this.

And then she built everything around that idea. The songs. The clothes. The hair. The humour. The way she spoke. The way she behaved. Even the businesses she built. They weren’t just a random collection of distinctive assets that happened to make Dolly memorable. They were different expressions of the same underlying idea.

This is the difference between a positioning statement and a positioning strategy. Once you know the core idea behind the brand, what makes it different, and why that difference matters, you have a decision-making filter.

Does this belong? Does it reinforce what we mean? Or does it pull us towards something we’re not? Every decision can either concentrate the idea or dilute it. Dolly kept concentrating it.

Which is also why she managed to achieve the holy grail for brands.

Dolly went into films. Theme parks. Books. Hospitality. Wine. Philanthropy. Initiatives that, on paper, could have stretched a weaker brand beyond recognition. But somehow they became more Dolly.

She achieved something companies spend fortunes trying and frequently failing to do: brand extension without dilution.

A positioning idea doesn’t necessarily tell you which category you’re allowed to operate in. It tells you what you’re allowed to mean. A new venture could become another expression of Dolly rather than Dolly becoming a famous name slapped onto an unrelated venture.

She could keep changing what she did, within the guardrails of what people understood Dolly to mean. That’s the difference between consistency and repetition. Consistency isn’t doing the same thing forever. It’s making different decisions that keep leading back to the same idea.

Except, there’s something missing here.

Dolly’s line about finding out who you are often gets cut short when repeated. She also used a slightly longer version, with two extra words:

Do it with purpose

She didn’t discover what made her different and then hold it at a socially acceptable level. She pushed it out there, with conviction. The hair got bigger. The clothes got louder. She got on her soapbox.

The persona became more Dolly, not less.

And as her success grew, as the fame followed, she didn’t start rounding off the edges and retreat towards the middle. She sharpened them.

Success creates enormous pressure to become more broadly acceptable. There are more people to please. More money at stake. More markets to enter. More reasons to remove the bits somebody, somewhere, might not like.

And despite the trope that “everybody loved Dolly”, everybody didn’t. Of course they didn’t.

Some people didn’t like the Appalachian accent. The hair. The makeup. The clothes. The music. The whole larger-than-life construction could be far too much if you weren’t buying what she was selling.

Good.

She didn’t arrive at widespread affection by sanitising away everything anybody might dislike. She became enormously loved while retaining things that gave other people perfectly good reasons not to like her.

You can’t be deeply loved without being disliked.

Companies frequently say they want to build a loved brand, while simultaneously removing anything that might cause somebody not to like them.

If nobody can find a reason to dislike you, there’s a decent chance nobody has much reason to love you either.

The people who loved it really loved it. The people who didn’t were free to keep walking.

That’s what telling the status quo to go f*ck itself really means. You don’t literally have to tell anybody to go f*ck themselves. You just have to be non-negotiably you when their view of what you should be is something else.

Just as importantly, she was relentlessly consistent with it.

For decades, the same idea kept showing up. The same identifiable look. The same voice. The same humour. The same values. The same contradictions. Not frozen in time, but unmistakably coming from the same place.

Dolly never got bored of being Dolly. This is a really important positioning lesson.

Companies get bored with themselves long before their customers do. New management arrives. The agency changes. Somebody wants to modernise the brand. The positioning starts to feel old internally precisely because the people inside the company have been staring at it every day for five years.

So they change it. Right around the time everybody else was beginning to remember it. Dolly resisted that impulse for decades.

Year after year, she reinforced the same idea in people’s minds until the association became impossible to separate from the person.

But repetition was only part of the compounding effect. Each new decision, expression and extension deposited a little more meaning in the same place.

Instead of accumulating random associations as Dolly expanded, everything she did became more concentrated around the same idea. And the more consistently everything pointed back to it, the more firmly that idea established itself in people’s minds.

That’s how positioning compounds.

And taken far enough, that compounding leads to the ultimate outcome of positioning: irreplaceability.

The ultimate objective isn’t simply to be different. It’s to occupy a piece of territory in people’s minds so completely that replacing you with the next-best alternative feels like losing something, not merely switching something. To become a category of one.

None of these principles are uniquely Dolly, by the way.

They are the classic principles of positioning, applied instinctively and unusually well.

Look back far enough at many of the strongest brands in the world and you’ll find some version of these principles at the point where they established their positioning.

Different categories. Different executions. Same underlying mechanics.

Dolly just happened to be an exceptionally vivid demonstration of what it looks like when you apply them.

🫵 Your turn…

What lessons can a company take away from this?

First, internalise these concepts:

1. Identity: Who you are.

2. Positioning: The part of who you are that is uniquely valuable in the minds of your prospects, relative to the alternatives.

3. Enemy: What you stand against. Defining what you are not creates contrast, sharpening what you are and guiding the decisions that follow.

4. Doing it on purpose: The act of turning positioning from an idea into something people can experience. Giving it form through the things you say, make and do.

5. Doing it with purpose: Having the conviction to amplify those things rather than temper them, and the discipline to keep doing it consistently over time.

Dolly’s homespun wisdom can be turned into a pretty brutal positioning test.

Find out who you are. What is essentially true about you? What is different about it? Is that difference valuable to someone? Is the mental territory available? And what, therefore, are you not?

Then use the answer as a compass to direct your efforts. Are the things you say, make and do concentrating that idea or diluting it? Are you doing it on purpose, with purpose? Are you getting on your soapbox?

Most companies fall down somewhere along that chain.

Some never really work out who they are. Some land on something their competitors already own. Some find something different that nobody cares about. Some find a genuinely strong position and then fail to express it clearly enough for anybody to notice.

Dolly did the opposite. She knew what she was. She knew what she wasn’t. She knew who it was for. She gave it unmistakable form. She amplified it. She repeated it. She let it travel into new places without allowing those places to redefine it.

She became a category of one.

There are plenty of country singers. Plenty of celebrities. There was only one Dolly.

And that’s the whole point. This week we lost Dolly Parton. But we didn’t lose the idea of Dolly Parton.

People physically disappear. Ideas live on in the little piece of territory they occupy in people’s minds that nobody else can.

That’s what positioning is.

Dolly managed it. One of a kind.

Back in your inbox soon. 🤘

Martin

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