- Positioning Playbook
- Posts
- The Rock
The Rock
Laying the solid idea smackdown on your competition.

To find indisputable strength, sometimes you need to go back to your roots.
In the case of Positioning, this is a concept known as “The Rock”.
No, not Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. Instead, a rock-solid idea.
Back in the late 60s, Al Ries of — up-and-coming and needing to make a name for itself — NY ad agency Ries Cappiello Colwell invented the concept.
“The Rock” is an indisputable idea.
It’s a differentiated competitive claim that prospects instantly accept into their minds and do not doubt or challenge.
In other words, it’s rock solid.

What’s the context here?
At the time, advertising was littered with messaging that made competitive claims along the lines of “we’re the best” for attributes and benefits that prospects cared the most about.
“The toughest tyres”
This was mostly ignored or disregarded since it didn’t enlist existing perceptions to support the competitive claim.
It lacked credibility. Hot air.
Conversely, “The Rock” was a concept that established a perceived, unquestionable truth in the minds of prospects. A powerful perception.
A ‘check-mate’ competitive claim.
What’s an example?
At the time, Uniroyal was a client of Ries Cappiello Colwell.
In an ad campaign, the objective was to instil the idea that Uniroyal was “the technology leader in the rubber industry.”
However, stating it literally like that is unpersuasive and unbelievable. Anyone can say something along the lines of “we’re the leader in XYZ”.
When someone claims they are the leader or the best at something, prospects are instantly suspicious. It’s human nature.
This language is white noise that’s diluted of resonance in most contexts (particularly in B2B nowadays) because it’s over-used and doesn’t reconcile with existing perceptions.
So, after some investigation, Ries Cappiello Colwell developed a message using their ‘rock’ concept that communicated “the leader” idea but in a convincing way:

This was a ‘rock solid’ idea because prospects used registered patents as a heuristic to assess technical innovation prowess (it was the 60s).
By rational deduction, whoever holds the most patents ‘must be’ the most technologically innovative — the leader.
It gave Uniroyal’s leadership claim credibility and substance — partly because it provided a convincing reason to adopt the perception, and partly because it invited the prospect to come to this conclusion using their own ‘independent thinking’.
It’s also a challenging claim for competitors to muscle in and steal:
First, said competitor would have to file and have more patents approved than Uniroyal (which would take a ton of time and money).
Secondly, said competitor would need to unseat Uniroyal from owning this idea in the minds of prospects (changing a mind is orders of a magnitude harder than implanting a new idea or perception).
Other examples from Al Ries:
For Belgian airline Sabena, their solid idea was: “In beautiful Belgium, there are five Amsterdams” (The Netherlands were getting more tourists than Belgium, yet The Michelin Guide rated only one Dutch city with the maximum star rating and Belgium five).
For the Jamaican tourist board, their solid idea was: “The Hawaii of the Caribbean". (Jamaica has a number of attributes that are similar to Hawaii and are collectively unique amongst all Caribbean islands).
For Stowe ski resort, their solid idea was: “The only top 10 ski resort in the East.” (Stowe was the only top 10 ranked ski resort globally located in the east of the United States).
Beautifully brilliant.
What’s pretty wild, though, is this kind of creative problem solving is absent in most present day marketing and sales messaging.
Companies unimaginatively (and lazily) cling onto referring to themselves as “the leader in XYZ”.
Not much thought seems to go into it — it’s like muscle memory. A tactical ‘best practice’ so tacit no one questions it.
This approach should only be chosen if it leverages a considered strategic advantage, which can be deduced by thinking through a company’s competitive position from a customer perception perspective.
For example, it’s a good strategy for Salesforce because it re-enforces an existing perception (they are perceived to be the dominant CRM category leader).
They also have a ‘rock solid idea’ to articulate this perception: “Ranked #1 based on market share”. The visual drives it home:

However, in most situations — particularly for startups and emerging brands — literally claiming you are “the leader” is often impotent messaging. It doesn’t activate existing perceptions agreeably.
If you are creating are new category or carving out a slice of an existing category, you communicate leadership convincingly by defining and growing it. Leading by example.
So many categories are full of self-proclaimed leaders, yet there are no followers. Something doesn’t add up, right? Prospects think the same.
Such a situation calls for creative thinking. There are much more potent ways to instil the perception of authority and leadership in regards to a desired domain, attribute, or benefit.
In other words: show, don’t tell. Be creative, using ‘The Rock’ concept.
What happened to ‘The Rock’?
If the ‘The Rock’ is such a great concept, what happened to it? Why aren’t we using it today?
It is being used today, sort of.
Inside Ries Cappiello Colwell, the ‘The Rock’ concept was initially tweaked to become the concept of a ‘position’. That is, a ‘position’ a company or brand would take in its communications to differentiate itself from competitors.
This evolved further, transferring the concept to the mind — a ‘position in the mind’ that a company must find, activate, and own.
From this, Positioning theory emerged and Al Ries and Jack Trout changed the world forever with it.
The point?
A key principle of Positioning theory is that leadership is one of the most powerful perceptions that instils buying behaviour. This can take numerous forms: leadership of a category, leadership of a niche, etc.
Essentially, ‘Positioning 101’ is flex your leadership.
This is why so many competitive claims you see today say “ABC, the leader in XYZ”.
The executional flaw, here, is that companies follow the ‘leadership’ principle blindly; not taking into consideration believability or credibility — “You’re the leader? Course you are mate 😉”
Essentially, they are taking a company ‘position’ but not a ‘mind’ position. The “leader” message gets ignored or rejected because it doesn’t fit with existing perceptions. It also goes unnoticed since it blends in with everybody else’s messaging.
It’s the concept of ‘The Rock’ executed in its weakest form. Particularly, if the leadership claim is paired with an an attribute or benefit that doesn’t map to a ‘position’ in the mind — e.g. “innovative” or “next-generation tech”.
Al [Ries] believes that, overall, a "position" is a better concept than a "rock." But he added, there would have been some advantages in sticking to his original thought, because "too many companies claim 'positions' that are totally unbelievable."
‘The Rock’ today
Nowadays, I consider ‘The Rock’ a tactical concept to convert Positioning into messaging. In other words, how can the Positioning idea be articulated as a rock solid competitive claim?
This is a deliberate exercise to move forward along a divergent pathway to all the literal “we’re the leader” messaging clutter.
To be clear, not a slogan or tagline. Instead, a competitive claim that can be deployed across a range of communication channels; PR, social media, self-published content, events, sales assets and conversations, etc.
It’s a concept to help establish the desired position in the minds of prospects, by embracing the essence of what the “Uniroyal holds more patents than any other rubber company” ad campaign did.
But, how do you know you ‘got it?’
Here’s 5 core principles:
😲 Be a little shocking
👀 Capitalise on existing perceptions
🔒 Your competitors can’t steal the claim (easily)
💡 It exploits a heuristic of how prospects measure leadership
🧠 The claim re-enforces the position you want to own in the mind
As a rule of thumb, saying it should feel like a mic drop moment. Like you could get up on stage, say it, drop the mic dramatically, and walk off having made an impact. The CEO of Uniroyal could have achieved this effect.
To do this requires approaching the problem, creatively.
Hall of Fame Example

Personal Example
When I was building by second B2B adtech company, Yavli, the competitive landscape got crowded and hot quickly shortly after we launched.
When this happened, competitors were dropping ambitious competitive claims all over the place. It became confusing for prospects — who is the best vendor for them?
Context: we were all providing ad blocking circumvention solutions for publishers and approaching the problem in different ways. Each of us was trying to position ourself as the leader through some dimension.
Through an important objective measure, we were the leaders in terms of advancing the space through monetisation. Yet, we were not perceived that way by prospects — we were just ‘one of many’ duking it out with the ad blockers in a cat and mouse game.
Our competitors found traction by positioning themselves as the leaders of contextualising the scale of the ad blocking problem, or, theoretical ways of neutering its adoption and mitigating its effects.
Meanwhile, we were actually doing those things — i.e. building technology that worked and making money for customers. Ad blockers saw us as a leader in this regard and devoted much of their effort to fighting us.
But, whilst battling the ad blockers on the front line was loud and visible to us, it was invisible from the view of prospects (publishers). They didn’t ‘live in that world’ day-to-day.
Frustratingly, we struggled to articulate our technological leadership in an ‘indisputable’ way that differentiated us from everybody else — i.e. conveying the technological gap that existed between us and competitors.
Similar to the Uniroyal example, we did explore the patent competitive claim approach (among others). But, that wasn’t effective in this context. For two reasons:
It was too easy for competitors to copy
The perception of patents has changed since the 60s
We applied for and had a patent approved. But, so did our competitors.
Communicating our patent-protected solution to prospects was not a convincing differentiator — whose patent is best? Who knows. They aren’t going to dig into it.
Patents are perceived as commoditised in terms of value proposition differentiation at the earliest stages of a new B2B category formation, and, most are worthless. Virtually everyone thinks this on some level. From personal experience, their primary utility is as a differentiator is in B2C in specific contexts.
Looking back on this time at Yavli now, and using ‘The Rock’ concept, I see a competitive claim quite clearly that we could have used to achieve this.

Similar to the Uniroyal concept, failed blocking attempts by the ad blockers could be used by prospects as a heuristic to assess the effectiveness of the technology (we had by far the most).
By rational deduction, whichever vendor has the most failed blocking attempts against it must have the best technology — the leader.
That’s it for today. I’ll be back in your inbox soon. 🤘
Martin
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