Positioning science 1: Minds & attention

Summary: Understand how right-brain ‘story 1’ and left-brain ‘story 2’ attention help us make sense of the niche/vision split in B2B positioning.

How do we use positioning to shape the fundamental narrative and vision that drives your startup — who you’re for, who you’re targeting, and what you’re trying to achieve?

This brings us back to the cornerstone of science-based positioning and the first of our three areas of science: the science of attention. You’ll have to forgive me for coming back to this, but it’s just so fundamental to what we’re discussing here.

We looked at Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s split-brain theory, ’the hierarchy of attention,’ when discussing the two modes of attention. Those two modes of attention necessarily, in my view, require two story types:

• Story 1: Change stories for right-brain ‘radar’ attention.
• Story 2: Focused stories for left-brain ’laser-beam’ attention

We’ve seen how, for prospects, investors, founders, and consultants, attention preferences can play a significant role in how we ‘attend’ to the world and the kind of positioning and narrative we therefore craft to match.

Here, we’re going to look at the nature of those two modes of attention in a little more detail and then how some of the biggest names in the B2B tech world currently address these modes of attention — in seemingly incompatible ways — and how we can synthesize them under our science-based positioning umbrella all so you can close more deals.

While we’ll talk about right versus left-brain attention here — and the respective approaches folks use to address each mode — the end game is actually to use a balance of right and left-brain attention, specifically in the right/left/right pattern, which is a powerful narrative unlock we’ll explore in the how-to section on narratives (or in Positioning Playbook for the really deep dive).

Left-brain vs. right-brain

We’ve talked a little bit about radars and laser beams, or broad, open, vigilant, right-brain attention and narrow, focused, left-brain attention. That’s a helpful starting point, but it obviously doesn’t include more than a hint of the detail McGilchrist provides in his epic books.

Thankfully, however, the man himself provided a shorthand summary of some of his findings about the divided brain in 2021’s The Matter With Things, excerpts of which I’ll quote below to help flesh out our left-hemisphere (LH) and right-hemisphere (RH) differences. Here’s McGilchrist:

• The LH is principally concerned with manipulation of the world; the RH with understanding the world as a whole and how to relate to it.
• The LH deals preferentially with detail, the local, what is central and in the foreground, and easily grasped; the RH with the whole picture, including the periphery or background, and all that is not immediately graspable. The importance of the global (RH)/local (LH) distinction cannot be overstated. […]
• The RH is on the lookout for, better at detecting and dealing with, whatever is new, the LH with what is familiar. […]
• The LH aims to narrow things down to a certainty, while the RH opens them up into possibility. […]
• The LH’s world tends towards fixity and stasis, that of the RH towards change and flow.
• The LH tends to see things as explicit and decontextualised, whereas the RH tends to see them as implicit and embedded in a context. As a result, the LH largely fails to understand metaphor, myth, irony, tone of voice, jokes, humour more generally, and poetry, and tends to take things literally. […]
• Machines and tools are alone coded in the LH. […]
• The RH understands narrative. The LH, if offered a story whose episodes are taken out of order, tends to regroup them so as to classify similar episodes together, rather than reconstruct them in the order that has human meaning. […]
• The RH contains the ‘body image’ (this is a slightly misleading neuropsychological term which refers not just to a visual image, but to a multimodal schema of the body as a whole). The LH tends to focus on parts – arms, legs and so on – out of which the body must then be constructed. The RH tends to process in a more embodied, less abstract fashion than the LH. […]
• The LH is superior for fine analytic sequencing and has a larger linguistic vocabulary and more complex syntax than the RH. Pragmatics, the ability to understand the overall import of an utterance in context, is, however, a RH function. […]
• The RH is essential for ‘theory of mind’: that is to say that it is better able to understand another’s point of view. […]
• One could say that the LH is the hemisphere of theory, the RH that of experience; the LH that of the map, the RH that of the terrain.
• The LH is unreasonably optimistic, and it lacks insight into its limitations. The RH is more realistic, but tends towards the pessimistic.

That is a very brief summary of some very profound differences, and I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which hemisphere is more dominant in society (and tech in particular).

In any case, hopefully you can see some recurring themes, such as:

• The right hemisphere understands narrative, the whole, the global, what’s new, change over time, what’s possible, what’s implicit, and the broader context.
• The left hemisphere, on the other hand, focuses on what’s manipulatable, the explicit, the familiar, the parts and pieces, the fine analysis, and the map, not the territory, so to speak.

I also hope you can see how this goes well beyond the old tropes of what “left brain” and “right brain” mean.

Speaking of which, in 2011, positioning OG Al Ries posted a video on YouTube talking about “better vs. different” and how “left-brain management always wants better products [but] right-brain marketing wants different products.”

Ries was perhaps echoing the now-debunked 1960’s pop-science view that the right brain was ‘creative’ (therefore it’s the creative marketing folks that want to create something new and different) while the left brain was ‘analytical’ (therefore the analytical finance-driven folks just want something marginally better).

If you squint, you can see where this creative vs. analytical idea came from — the right hemisphere is indeed better at looking out for what’s new (or “different”) while the left hemisphere is more attuned to what’s familiar (or merely “better,” as Ries puts it). But we now have a far more sophisticated view of how both hemispheres operate, and this gives us one of the main advantages of science-based positioning.

Your turn

• As a founder or leader, which of these two modes of attention resonate most with you?
• Which of these two modes of attention do you think your prospects tend to use?
• Reflect on your current pitch — do you take more of a story 1, right-hemisphere approach, or a story 2, left-hemisphere approach? And does your attention and your prospects’ attention match?

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis

We’ve got the science, now let’s see how that shows up in application, particularly in terms of synthesizing seemingly incompatible approaches. We’re going to nerd out a little here on common approaches to B2B positioning and narrative, but bear with me as this will demonstrate why understanding the hierarchy of attention is so important for startup success.

In the B2B world, we’ve established that there are two common approaches to positioning and narrative:

1. Big change stories: You’re creating a new category! You’ve got a strategic narrative! You’re riding a new (AI-driven) wave!
2. Narrow solution stories: Find the niche, create the disruptive, worse-but-better product, or develop the mythical 10x solution. We’ve built just the thing for you and your exact problem! We know your niche role and industry inside out!

Different folks advocate for different positioning approaches here — and often throw shade at the other approach, too. Theirs is the right approach (thesis), unlike the other approach (antithesis). But now, with our more sophisticated understanding of left and right-brain attention, we can construct a bigger umbrella (synthesis) for all these approaches.

First, though, let’s look at one thesis for narrative and positioning — big change stories.

Go big(ger)

The biggest proponent of the biggest kinds of change stories is 2016’s Play Bigger. This was the book that put category creation on the map for many VCs and startups. The Play Bigger authors aren’t shy of a big change story either, claiming to supersede all that had come before them. Here they are introducing their own ‘category,’ the concept of ‘category design’:

Category design isn’t just positioning or branding. We have great respect for the seminal 1970s book Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Their sense of positioning as a necessary discipline was on the mark for the late twentieth century. But in this century of mobile/social/cloud, dynamics have changed, and positioning is only one part of category design. And as for branding—we call branding agencies “tattoo parlors.” You don’t want to wake up with Mike Tyson’s tattoo on your face, so don’t let someone else tattoo you. Brands don’t make a category king. Category design does.

That is a big story 1 pitch. Positioning (of the Ries & Trout variety) is dead! Branding is bad! You need to ‘play bigger’ because so much has changed!

Story 1 pitches are very much about external change over time, and the Play Bigger folks are big fans of this narrative approach (which I dissect at considerable length in Positioning Playbook). Here, they roll everything internet (mobile/social/cloud) into a single bundle of change. That change, they argue, demands a new approach, and they’ve got just what the doctor ordered: category creation and ‘category design.’

I have extremely mixed feelings about this approach, but I actually studied what these folks did, not just what they said, and a pattern of sorts emerged. Here’s the Play Bigger playbook:

• Coin a new phrase (such as ‘category design’ for their own work).
• Declare it a new discipline.
• Describe a playbook for that discipline.
• Suggest the company go all-in on it.

Sometimes, in the B2B SaaS world, this worked a treat (Qualtrics — huge respect for their work there), and sometimes it didn’t (Mural — can’t win ’em all). We’ll touch on more examples of category creation when we run through our strategic choices, but for now I just want to give you the flavor of what a big change story might look like, especially given that, until now, we’ve lacked an umbrella framework to categorize these approaches.

The strategic narrative

Another take on this kind of change story comes from Andy Raskin, famous for his strategic narrative methodology, which also follows a similar story 1 pattern. To paraphrase Raskin’s narrative approach:

• There’s some big change ‘out there’ that’s external to your company.
• It’s high-stakes, do-or-die stuff.
• There’s a promised land on the other side.
• Our tools and features will help you get there.

In Raskin’s telling, the OG of this approach was B2B subscriptions platform Zuora, and one of their reps had success closing big enterprise deals targeting the C-suite with this style of change-over-time pitch. Again, this was a story 1 pitch for right-brain attention, which is usually where execs are focused.

You can see how, in both approaches, there’s a lot of story 1 context-setting before the shift down to any story 2 specifics around a product and its features.

This is big right-brain stuff — change over time, the new, the global, the opening up to new possibilities, and the integration of a new reality.

Go narrower

So on the one side we have these right-brain, story 1 pitches about some massive change happening out there on the radar that necessitates a whole new way of doing things.

On the other side, we have the story 2 approach. This is where positioning began with OGs Ries and Trout (though they weren’t afraid of suggesting you create a category, either), but in tech, it’s more a case of Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm (1991) fame and April Dunford, as mentioned, especially in her 2019 book Obviously Awesome.

Here we get focused and specific.

Moore advocated building momentum in a niche with tight positioning so you could ‘cross the chasm’ between early adopters and the mainstream, and Dunford gave us a positioning methodology for finding best-fit customers who care a lot about your unique value. (I am, for the record, a huge fan of April and wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t for Obviously Awesome and her tireless work advocating for positioning.)

Dunford’s approach is interesting precisely because it’s not about finding your positioning ‘out there,’ it’s about finding it down in your existing customer base. And, from time to time, Dunford will call out marketers for getting carried away with what is essentially story 1 narrative, criticizing “marketers [who] can get a bit of main character energy when it comes to this stuff.” In Dunford’s view, “our goals as vendors don’t belong in the center of our positioning. The value we can deliver for our customers needs to be the core.”

That is, narrow your focus to the specific value that you can deliver, and stop worrying so much about the change-over-time story (especially if you think you’re starting a ‘revolution’ or ‘movement’). And that makes sense — marketers absolutely can get carried away with the change story, and as we’ll see when we look at our “find it” strategic choice, there’s plenty of folks who found their winning position without creating a category, for example.

To be fair to Dunford, her advice is not that you should never create a category; she just thinks it’s rare — maybe something 1 in 10 companies should do, and her focus is much more on finding patterns in your existing customer base.

The category creation folks, by way of contrast, think 100% of winning companies ‘create a category,’ which is a silly and easily refuted claim, but it serves to highlight the attention preferences at play here. Some folks lean heavily into the right-brain approach; some lean more into the left-brain approach, and before I came across McGilchrist’s hierarchy of attention, I assumed these approaches were entirely incompatible. But now I understand we need to use the appropriate amount of both modes of attention.

Go broader

Maybe Dunford’s approach resonates with you if you lean towards the left-brain mode of attention or maybe you actually prefer the big right-brain category story. (If you do, that’s fine — venture-backed startups are about the megahit, after all — but getting there can require going narrow first.)

Those are the common B2B approaches. Now let’s throw a B2C spanner in the works.

You should also know that some highly influential marketing academics think — with a somewhat amusing degree of left-brain certainty — that either way, you’re flat out wrong. Customers, in this view, are “uncaring cognitive misers” who don’t care about story 1 or story 2.

In fact, to channel Don Draper, they don’t think about you at all.

In this modern brand world, positioning is out. So is differentiation. And persuasion, message comprehension, and appealing to reason — in the bin, all of it!

This is the brutal B2C brand marketing world of Professor Byron Sharp’s 2010 book How Brands Grow, which is one of the most influential modern books in mainstream B2C marketing. Applying those principles alone to the world of B2B tech sales would obviously be highly career disadvantageous, to put it mildly. But in a world where B2B and B2C marketing discussions bizarrely never really overlap, it’s super fascinating to see what’s happening on the other side of the fence.

This approach also gives us an important third leg to our science-based positioning stool — the fundamental of memory building as our third strategy choice. This world of modern brand marketing has become increasingly attractive in a saturated B2B world, especially as short-term growth tactics dry up, so it pays to be aware of it.

Synthesis

That was a speed run of common positioning approaches across B2B and B2C. Go big, go narrow, or go for memories and forget the idea of segmentation altogether.

These are all useful tools to have when it comes to translating a founder’s vision — in both senses of the word — to a winning position in the market.

The problem is they’re often presented as absolute — or near-absolute — choices. Change narrative or value positioning. Story 1 or story 2. Category or brand. Brand or positioning. And so on. You have to choose!

But do we?

If one of these approaches works for you, great. But if you’re stuck, you might wonder why, and in my experience, founders getting trapped in one mode of attention can be a huge obstacle to growth.

My experience at The Unicorn demonstrated the limits of the story 1 approach. That was all vision and narrative with no analysis, with little getting into the weeds with the product and their customers to develop their story 2 about how to actually manipulate the world in a new way.

The reverse can be true, too. Just as I was reviewing this chapter, I got the update newsletter of an interesting B2B SaaS I’d been following for several years. They’d built a powerful platform and were doing all the ‘right’ positioning things insofar as there was loads of analysis going on to try and find which customers got the most value out of their tool, but they still felt like they were going around in circles. They’d spent years building a competitor to your Airtable, Notion, and Linear-style tools, but despite building it, no one much had come. Why? Well, it was all very story 2 — there wasn’t a clear, right-brain story 1 narrative — with a GTM strategy to match — to put it on folks’ radar in the first place.

I really felt for these folks because I could see the attention trap they were caught in so clearly. It was all left-brain laser beam — analyzing the features they should build (and building them), analyzing the customers that kinda sorta got it (and trying to position around them), and being stuck as to where to go next. Build and analyze, build and analyze, but no bigger-picture story 1 to connect it to.

Balance

The reality is that we need a balanced approach, and the good news is McGilchrist gives us one, and we’ll pick that up in our narrative discussion. Both left-brain laser beam and right-brain radar approaches can work; they both reflect the two fundamental modes of attention we all have. But if you get caught in one or the other and can’t adapt, you get stuck.

Rather than seeing these as incompatible absolute approaches, it makes much more sense to see them as different means of addressing different kinds of attention. That’s how we land on our handy 2x2 that covers both broad narratives, narrow positioning, and brand-driven memory building.

This is what science-based positioning — and the modern science of attention in-particular — gives us. SBP provides a framework that makes sense of all of these approaches. We know what they are, where they fit, and the type of prospect attention they’re most suited to meet. This makes for a very powerful positioning framework.

But those strategies aren’t just about pitching individuals; they’re about seeding an innovative product in the broader market. How does that work? What science can we draw from to understand our market strategy choices? That’s what we’ll explore next.

First published: September 2024 · Last updated: November 11, 2024