Poison pills and positioning

I need your help to find me a new positioning statement for Babbage Insight, one that includes an effective "poison pill"

I possibly mentioned it recently in a private newsletter sent to “friends” of my company - one of the difficulties we had in our first attempt at fund raising earlier this year was to communicate accurately as to what we are doing.

The problem with “AI Data Analyst” (which has been our broad messaging for a few months now) is that it is too vague. As Hyman Marvin Minsky would’ve put it, it is a “suitcase term”, which everyone can interpret in their own way and still be right (a suitcase contains several different things - remember?).

More importantly, the problem with “AI Data Analyst” is that it is too easy to claim. It is all nice and good terms. AI is good. Data is good. Analyst is good. All of them are desirable as well. This means that for anyone who is working approximately in these areas, it is easy to claim that they are doing this.

So what we need, really, is a poison pill in our positioning.

We need a poison pill, and we’re yet to figure out what that is. Basically, in our positioning, we need to include something that is hard to copy, or even hard for people to claim to copy, which will set us apart. Now I know this might sound like Marketing 101 to those of you who are proficient at it, but that’s one of the (two) courses that I got a C in at IIMB, and so I’m figuring it all out the hard way deep into my career.

Scooter seat covers

Sometimes you wonder why celebrities dress outrageously. It’s not that they lack taste, or style, as some people might claim. They dress outrageously because they want to stand out. The outrageousness in their style is their “poison pill”, that makes it hard for other people to copy.

For example, a couple of weeks back, this meme made its way to me as a WhatsApp forward:

It makes fun of how Justin Bieber is not wearing a shirt, and his knickers are showing, and how Anant Ambani is wearing a “scooter seat cover”. There are careful deliberate choices - they are able to dress so outrageously because they can, and they want to dress this way because nobody else will copy them.

Thanks to this photo, you won’t see the “scooter seat material coat” ever becoming fashionable. This is not easy to copy. This is poison pill marketing at its finest.

Rory Sutherland agrees

I’ve been a huge fan of Rory Sutherland ever since I read his book Alchemy some five years ago. He is a veteran marketer, currently Vice Chairman at the Ogilvy Group, and today he has written pretty much the same thing, about poison pill marketing:

“Always double-down on the things your competitors are culturally or temperamentally incapable of adopting.”, he says.

A request

So this is a good time to ask for some help, in terms of figuring out our positioning statement here at Babbage Insight. Right now our positioning is too goody goody, allowing everyone to claim that. And even if no one sees us as their competitors (since we are really in early stage), our "highly desirable” positioning statement means that it is easy for people (customers, investors) to misunderstand what we are offering.

We need to introduce some “bad boy” stuff. And this needs to be stuff that is natural to our product - you don’t want to do poison pill stuff just for the heck of it.

The only differentiator I can think of right now is that we don’t offer a natural language interface, or “prompts”. This might make it seem like we’re not using the full utility of LLMs, but now I’m starting to wonder if this is poison pill enough!