The Power of Authentic Positioning: A Conversation about Peace of Mind

Speakers: Katie Flynn, Mallory Diamond

And I have this very specific memory.

My dad, when I was, I don’t know, a pre-teen, bought me, remember those old Starbucks mixes? Like the cafe mixes you would buy when you went up to like buy a, you know, for a Pacino at Starbucks? Maybe?

They were CDs. Okay, oh, oh yes, I remember. They sold them like right at checkout, like in stacks, yeah.

And that song was on a Valentine’s Day edition of a Starbucks mix or whatever. And I like burned it to my, you know, Mac that I had at my house and listened to it over and over again, so.

I never, I didn’t start drinking coffee until the pandemic actually, so I was never in a Starbucks before then. I missed it, yeah. What? Yeah, well, yeah, I just had no reason to go in there.

That’s very interesting.

Well, anyways, I think we’ll dive right in. So I’m gonna give a mini intro on you. Mallory Diamond, you are our director of relationship development here at Flynn. And you have been here now for just about two years. I’m going on three. Really? Yeah, this fall it will be three years. I guess I’m a whole year behind.

Sorry about that. Well, time doesn’t mean anything anymore. We all, yeah, it all blurs together.

Yes, well, what we have focused on a lot of for the last three years is getting ourselves in order to make sure that we have the right parts and pieces so that when we go out and we talk to clients or we’re prospecting or whatever it might be, that you have the things that you might need. And so what we’re gonna focus on today is really agency positioning. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about our positioning and how we got there and why

it and all of those fun things. And then also I think it would be worth touching a little bit on just why it’s so important as an agency to have a solid customer value proposition

and the other like parts and pieces that are helpful in your role to have in line,

when you’re going out to the world and trying to sell. So let’s start with peace of mind, I guess.

Well, first I would say that, I mean, yes, it’s me and my role, but a clear positioning is so important for the total agency for all of us to have clarity

and bring authenticity to really what we’re offering clients. We have to feel really, really good about it. And that’s why, and I know we’re gonna get into this, but I think that’s why it takes so fricking long to really work on that and work through it and all the questions and kind of self questioning that goes in with developing a strong positioning. And certainly, we work in a really crowded field

and I will never forget going to a conference some years ago and one of the consultants that was presenting said, here are the same seven slides that 95% of agencies have given their creds presentation. And for me, that was a moment of like, wait a second, wait, what?

That’s not gonna work. How do we stand apart? So it really is a big investment and hopefully one that the whole agency can embrace and feel really good about.

Yeah, absolutely. And it has been very, very helpful. And I think there’s a couple of interesting things, right? We have been around for a really long time. We’re coming up on 60 years and a couple of years, which is so wild.

But when you have been in business for that long, you’ve done a lot of things. And so it can be very difficult to succinctly talk about what it is that you do and what it is you do well without sort of feeling like you’re carving out a subsection of stuff that you also can do, but maybe aren’t trying to focus on it. And that’s why I think some of the conversations we had around all of this stuff, it was a long fricking process. And it’s a bit of a slog because you’re trying to bring a lot of people along and get to one succinct idea.

Very, very challenging. So I will commend you for your ability to do that. I know you and Pete Bondurlin, our chief creative officer, were the ones who came up with our positioning. So I guess first we should just share what that is. And maybe you can just talk a little bit about how you got there, how you guys got to that initial idea.

Yeah, well, I’m newer to the Flynn team. A lot of our team have been here for many years.

And coming in as kind of an outsider, I’ll get to the process and then we can arrive at the destination of what this positioning is. So coming in as kind of an outsider with a fresh perspective, one of my very early focuses was on figuring out a better way to tell our story. Because you’re totally right. Agencies, especially ones that have as much history as ours do, go through a lot of chapters and go through a lot of different stages of growth. And we’ve brought in new capabilities over the years, new talent, we’ve worked with certain new clients, we’ve expanded into different verticals. So all of that over time can kind of muddy things. And if you’re not really paying attention and kind of revisiting that every few periods, you can get kind of muddled. So coming in, I knew that that was really important for us to kind of just take a moment to put some eyes on that and say, what are we really saying about ourselves?

And I started to put all of our portfolio on the table and say, well, yeah, we’ve done a lot in that 60 years, but what are the commonalities we’re seeing? Where do we really do our strongest, most impactful work for clients? And also what do we love doing? Like, if we had our druthers and a magic wand and could choose anything to do, what would that thing be? So for me, just coming in as that fresh kind of perspective, I immediately started to see a lot of experience in working obviously in highly regulated spaces. So we don’t shy away from those very complex, rigorous types of demands that clients in highly regulated industries carry with them. And I also saw a lot of work helping clients customers

find clear decisions and make good choices, make good brand choices during very high consideration and high importance moments. Like the moments that really matter.

So we’re talking about things like,

where am I gonna send my kid to school for the best education? What’s the life insurance policy I should sign up for to make sure that my family’s taken care of if anything ever happens to me? Those types of really deep, like emotional kinds of questions and decisions that consumers wrestle with. And that was a consistent theme across a lot of the body of work that Flynn has done with some very large names.

So ultimately, we had been toying around, in my office with a lot of stuff up on the board and trying to kind of wrestle with these observations and get it all out there. And early on, we were like, yeah, it’s high consideration purchase decisions. It’s highly regulated spaces, but it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. No, it does not. And what is at the crux of all of that really? It’s helping our clients’ customers find peace of mind. And then that was the light bulb moment because we were like, ah, okay, that’s really, really key here. It’s not just about where we’re working. It’s about what we’re delivering for our clients and consumer.

Yeah, and that was major. It was so helpful to have an outside perspective too, because you’re right, you get just too close to things. It becomes very difficult to see it from an objective point of view. And I remember when you said it, I was like, that’s a really clever way to encompass, and accurate way, to encompass all that it is that we do. And the biggest clients that we’ve had in the last few years, the most impactful clients we’ve had in those, the last few years, and the stuff that we like to do as well. And I know I had, you know, I joked with you a little bit that it resonated with me personally. And it was one of those situations where when it was shared with me and Chris the CEO and Kevin,

executive advisor,

when something isn’t commonplace or like hasn’t existed really before in your world, it’s really hard to digest that at first. But I immediately, I remember texting you from the parking lot being like, and we could do this with the space when we move into our next office space and we can do this piece. But for me, you know, we were joking last week, I am a relatively like moderately anxious person and always have been.

And I have put a lot of, you know, systems and processes in place in my life to help me with those things, whether they be simple things like maintaining a routine or doing yoga or whatever.

But I remember when you presented the idea for the positioning, I was like, oh, do you know I have a tattoo that means peace between mind, body and spirit? Like it just felt like it was, there was this really nice through line,

you know, with my values and philosophies on what’s important and whatnot

and what we could be delivering for our clients and their customers. So ultimately it’s the direction we went in of course.

I’m glad we went in that direction because it’s really

is sacrifice, right? At the end of the day. And that’s what I think a lot of agencies struggle with. They go, well, if I say we’re this, or if we pursue this, we can’t pursue that. And I think, yeah, there’s, you have to get comfortable with that, right?

And over time, I think it’s become something that we have really seen ourselves in in a very genuine way. It’s not just about the categories we work in and kind of the types of clients and purchase decisions we support, but it’s also just naturally as a nearly 60 year old business that’s extremely oriented around high levels of client service, it’s also just natural to the way we work. And you’ve talked so much about, we wanna be the best part of client stays. We wanna be the bright spot in their week.

And it’s just what we want to deliver to clients as well, that peace of mind that when they come and work with Flynn,

they don’t need to worry. We are their partner through and through, and we’ll kind of stand shoulder to shoulder to shoulder with them to work through their problems.

You’re right. And it extended so nicely to what we bring to clients in terms of their mindset, I suppose,

being that we used to talk about being very data driven and performance driven and all those things. And that is very true. It’s also something that a lot of people say in that way. And so it was just a little bit of a different way going about it saying, here’s how we think about it,

because we’re up against some really formidable shops sometimes and whether those be in reviews or we work alongside other agencies with clients. And it’s nice to have that little thing that people are like, oh yeah, I remember, this is what they focus on. That’s nice and succinct.

Yeah, you’re totally right. I mean, I think that’s something that when we were evaluating where we’ve been and where we wanted to go, the concept of being performance driven, the concept of being results oriented and data driven is so table stakes that it is undifferentiating. And yeah, we expect that we are gonna behave that way and operate that way to get the best results for clients. So it all came back to where’s our soul really sit? Where is our happy place? And I think we found that authentically in our positioning, which to bring it all home is we help peace of mind brands perform better.

Yes, it sure is. And yes, I agree with you. It fits really well with what we do. And when I’m talking to prospects and I’m sure you feel the same and when we’re in meetings together, you get a lot of head nodding. It just makes it a lot easier for us to have this little elevator pitch, if you will, of like, here’s what we do if you remember nothing else. So it’s gone a far way. But I will say with that has come a lot of additional work to get us organized and to make sure that we have the foundational things that we need, building the foundation of the house before we can put the framing up, all of those things. Like what other things in your role do you find it very helpful to have in place before you can go out and really sell the agency with authenticity,

stopping power, effectiveness, all of those things that you already mentioned. I’m sure there’s a very long list.

There is a long list and we made a long list.

And it can be as basic as making sure that the front door matches what’s behind the door. We’re in the process right now of making some big, exciting changes to things like our website. So those are some foundational elements. You wanna be consistent, certainly. A brand is consistency and something delivered over time.

The experience is the brand is another one people say.

So getting some of those things in order and just kind of making sure that that was setting ourselves up to tell the best story. Certainly it’s a re-visitation of things like our work and how we’re telling stories about how this incorporated into all of that,

investing in some better asset development, making sure that we have plans in place to roll this out not just to folks that are doing business with us but also our staff. We wanted, I remember we had a big session where we kind of presented this to everyone, not just the senior team who obviously had to love it but for our whole agency to really work through that together and talk about it. And we gave everyone the opportunity to give questions and challenge it and push on it. And kind of, because at the end of the day I think it’s something that needs to be felt and lived through and through in how you work. Not just what you say you do, but in how you work.

Sure, sure. No, I think that makes complete sense.

I think one of the other reasons it felt very authentic to us is because especially in the last five years here, we have had a major, major focus on our culture and in terms of what we want the people who work here to feel on a day-to-day basis.

And we focus a lot on balance, which doesn’t necessarily mean for us that every single day is balanced, right? Like some weeks, we’re in a week right now where it’s just really busy. And I’m sure in two weeks, it’s gonna be a period of time where it’s not. But I feel like what we deliver, that promise delivered for our colleagues is that you can have the peace of mind that that balance is going to resume at some point.

And that we all got into the agency business for, I don’t know what reason. Flights for punishment. Exactly.

But I think that that is something that we put a lot of emphasis on. I can’t speak for every agency in the US. There’s something like 100,000 or something crazy. But I think that we deliver that more than probably some others can say because we make a concerted effort to do so.

And so that’s another reason why I think it felt really organic to us and natural for me.

It’s just easy to talk about.

Yeah, and the other great

thing that we were really drawn to on this concept and this kind of articulation of why Flynn exists and what we do really well is because peace of mind as a purchase driver is evergreen. And it’s going to be present. It was present back then. It’s present now. It’s gonna matter in the future. And I would say probably even more so. I was gonna say maybe more now than ever. Maybe more now than ever as we continue to see a lot of things changing in all different kinds of industries.

Yeah, you said a mouthful there, lady. But yes, it’s been wonderful. And I feel like

agencies out there that are like, oh, it’s gonna be such a process to get us organized with these types of things, like take the plunge. It helps so much in those conversations. It helps in our decision making from a leadership perspective, our hiring practices. It really, your positioning extends through pretty much every decision that you make as a business.

And I think it brings a lot of clarity to the people that you work with. So I probably haven’t said this in the last couple of years since we rolled it out, but I so appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into that because it has made the storytelling for us so much easier. And it just, it does. It feels really organic for us. So I’m very happy to have it.

It’s like birthing a baby.

It’s a lot of pain and a lot of preparation