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Shot in Brooklyn (New York), Williamsburg

9 min read

Positioning: the most authentic kind comes before strategy

In Williamsburg, positioning was born without a plan. Philip Selznick explained in 1957 that a company, too, is partly engineered and partly grown.

Andrea Barchiesi
Andrea Barchiesi

Contents

In this Italian-language video, shot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I say that the neighborhood’s identity was not designed by an agency, and that the most authentic form of positioning is the one that is born before strategy. Here I describe where an identity like that comes from, drawing on a 1957 book by the sociologist Philip Selznick, and why it pays to write it down before growth puts it to the test.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

This morning I went back to Williamsburg for the first time in a few months. Every facade, every sign, every shop window speaks of a well-defined positioning. But what struck me most is something else: the neighborhood has an identity so strong that you recognize it within three blocks. It was not designed by an agency. It emerged from an ecosystem of people who made the same aesthetic and cultural choices without coordinating with one another. And I wonder whether this is the most authentic form of positioning: the one that is born before strategy.

The problem is that when a neighborhood like this one becomes famous, the chains and the global brands arrive, rents triple, and the artists, the very people who grafted this unique identity onto this neighborhood, leave. Success drives out the people who created it. The same thing happens in companies: you grow, you hire, you build a structure, and at some point you look around and no longer recognize what you were. I am not saying you have to stay small. Quite the opposite.

I am saying you have to grow knowing what you are not willing to lose. And to know that, you have to have defined it beforehand.

At a glance

  • Andrea Barchiesi, business strategist, argues that the most authentic positioning grows out of the identity a company has already given itself through its choices, and that the strategist reads it and writes it down before growth puts it to the test.
  • Philip Selznick explained in 1957 that institutions may be partly engineered, but are also the product of interaction and adaptation, and that the people who lead them have the task of promoting and protecting their values.
  • An identity that no one has written down leaves with the people who carried it: before growing, the people who run the company decide what they are not willing to lose, and put it in writing.

My thesis

The most authentic positioning grows out of the identity a company has already given itself through its choices: the strategist reads it and writes it down before growth puts it to the test.

You can recognize Williamsburg’s positioning within three blocks

Artists began arriving in Williamsburg in the late 1980s, when the East Village had become too expensive for recent graduates. Across the East River, Kay Hymowitz writes in City Journal, there were empty, cheap lofts, big enough for installations, and the L train could take the artists back and forth to the bars and clubs of the Village. By 1990 there were perhaps 2,000 of them. None of them had a plan for the neighborhood, and yet the neighborhood, block by block, took on their look: the signs, the shop windows, the bars.

The most authentic positioning grows out of the identity a company has already given itself through its choices: the strategist reads it and writes it down before growth puts it to the test.

Even the most successful designs that make up that look came about in the same way. When Steve Hindy and Tom Potter founded their brewery, they were thinking of calling it Brooklyn Eagle, after Brooklyn’s historic newspaper. They asked Milton Glaser, the designer of I ♥ NY, for an identity, and Glaser started with the name: “Let’s claim Brooklyn. No one is claiming Brooklyn. It’s an undervalued place,” according to the Cooper Union, the school where he trained. That is how the Brooklyn Brewery was born. One of the city’s best-known designers started from what was already there, a place no one had yet claimed.

In the video I say that the neighborhood’s identity was not designed by an agency, and for the neighborhood as a whole that is true: no one designed it. Glaser shows what good design does when it does arrive. It gives form to something that already exists, as I have written about corporate identity.

Selznick: a company is partly engineered and partly grown

In 1957 the American sociologist Philip Selznick published a short book, Leadership in Administration, that distinguishes between two things an organization can be. An organization, he writes, is a technical instrument, designed as a means to specific ends and judged by engineering standards, and for that reason it can be replaced. Institutions, on the other hand, “may be partly engineered, but they also have a ‘natural’ dimension”: they are the product of interaction and adaptation, they become repositories of a group’s ideals, and they are less easily replaced (pp. 21–22).

The move from one to the other has a name. To institutionalize, for Selznick, is “to infuse with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand” (p. 17). In a company it happens when certain choices, repeated for years, stop being merely choices and become part of what the company is: the customer it will not give up, the work it will not outsource, the tone in which it answers the phone. Selznick also linked this process to a term still used in strategy, distinctive competence, which he introduced in that very book.

Philip Selznick explained in 1957 that institutions may be partly engineered, but are also the product of interaction and adaptation, and that the people who lead them have the task of promoting and protecting their values.

The institutional leader, he writes, is primarily “an expert in the promotion and protection of values” (p. 28). The leader finds those values laid down in the organization’s history, recognizes them and decides which ones to defend. It is the same move as in emergent strategy: what emerged in practice has to be recognized and chosen. That is why, when I speak of building an identity, I mean making it legible. The material is already there, and the work is to write it down so that everyone in the company can use it.

Beneath the artists lies the Giglio of Nola

In the video I say that the artists “grafted” their identity onto the neighborhood, and the word is precise: you graft onto a plant that is already there. In the late nineteenth century, immigrants from southern Italy came to Williamsburg to work in the factories, warehouses and docks along the river, and settled along Roebling and Havemeyer Streets, next to Irish, German, Jewish, Polish and Lithuanian neighbors. The wooden church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel dates from 1887. In 1903 the mutual aid society of immigrants from Nola, a town near Naples, made the first Giglio in America dance along Havemeyer Street in honor of Saint Paulinus (I. Sheldon Posen and Joseph Sciorra). A giglio is a tall decorated tower carried on the shoulders of a team of men.

The artists who arrived almost a century later found a neighborhood that already had an identity grown from the ground up, and theirs was added to it as a new layer. Reading the identity of a place or a company also means choosing which layer counts: the founder’s tradition, the way one department works, the reputation customers describe. The choice belongs to the people who run the company; the strategist helps them make it. It is one of the reasons why I talk to everyone, from executives to shop-floor workers: the oldest layers of an identity are often found far from management’s offices.

Identity has to be written down before the company grows

The other side of the story comes with success. Between 1990 and 2010–2014, the average rent in Williamsburg and Greenpoint rose by 78.7 percent, the highest increase in the city, against a citywide average of 22.1 percent (NYU Furman Center, 2016). Pierogi, the gallery Joe Amrhein and Susan Swenson had opened in 1994, left North Ninth Street for the Lower East Side in early 2016, to be closer to its audience. “It’s not really an artist community anymore,” Amrhein told the Brooklyn Paper, adding that artists had been moving out since the early 2000s, because of rent and the lack of space.

An identity that no one has written down leaves with the people who carried it: before growing, the people who run the company decide what they are not willing to lose, and put it in writing.

For Selznick, the leader of an institution must be able to define and defend its values, and defending them is easier when someone has put them on a page before the pressure arrives. That page says only a few things: what the company will not give up in order to grow faster, and which people and which kinds of work carry its character. The owners decide what goes on it, and I help them write it: it is part of the work on identity and positioning. Among the choices in a business strategy, it is one of the most delicate.

I have great respect for those who write it when things are going well, because that is when it seems least necessary. What happens when no one does it is the subject of the other video I shot in Williamsburg, on the relationship between growth and identity.

What to do and what not to do

  • Look for the identity in the choices already made, in the people the company has said no to and the things it has never wanted to change, before writing it down.
  • Before a phase of growth, write down what the company is not willing to lose.
  • Listen to the people who carry the identity, including those far from leadership, before they leave.
  • Do not expect a new name or a new logo to provide an identity that the company’s choices do not confirm.
  • Do not mistake the most recent layer of an identity for the whole identity.

Sources

Business strategy

Business strategy is the set of decisions through which a company chooses what to do and what not to do in order to reach its long-term goals, improve its competitive position and grow in a sustainable way.

Full definition

My work · Identity and positioning

Before it communicates, a company has to know what it is and what it is not. We put that in writing with the owners, and the words and the market decisions start from there.

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