Unconventional wisdom

What’s the countermove? Inversion shows you

When it comes to corporate communications, I’ve learned that getting the core message right often means working backward.

Most companies start with what they believe makes them unique. Fair enough but don’t leave out, “What are we not?”

Perform this inversion exercise: ask clients and colleagues what makes their solution different, then push further. What would make it indistinguishable? What would make a customer ignore it? What would make the message fail? The truth shows up in those responses.

Inversion works as a way to pressure test assumptions. Instead of focusing on the desired outcome, you examine what would prevent it. (What would it take, to lose the big game?)

What’s presented as unique, but really isn’t, collapses under scrutiny. Strip away the language, the positioning and the claims to the cleanest truths and what remains is (often) the core. That’s the point of the exercise.

This approach runs counter to how most marketing organizations operate. Consensus often feels great and familiar language can be reassuring, but when everyone agrees it can also mean that no one has challenged the premise. When everyone sees the same thing, no one sees what’s missing. Inversion forces a search for exactly that. It challenges, and it exposes what matters, paving the way for clearer ideas.

Avis ran into this decades ago. The obvious move by the auto-rental brand was to claim leadership, the same strategy other challenger brands would have made. Instead the brand asked the inverse: what would make this campaign indistinguishable from every other car rental ad? 

The honest answer was what everyone was avoiding — that Avis, while a good choice, wasn’t the market leader, Hertz. That admission became Avis’ classic tagline “We Try Harder,” one of the most enduring campaigns in advertising history. In this case, the inversion became the message.

Here’s the method in practice. Take a few moments, step away from the noise and write down the main points of your idea/concept, etc. List comprehensively key concepts and even the individual words tied to the topic. Really get in there and pull everything you can think of onto the page, a brain dump of what the thing is or could be. Include the conventional wisdom.

After exhausting your own thinking the picture will begin to sharpen, weaknesses in your thinking becoming clearer and the strong ideas emerging to stand apart.

Japanese declutter guru Marie Kondo nails it, with this comment: “We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of.”

The same applies to messaging. The story already exists; your job is to uncover it like carving a statue from a slab of granite. The job is to reveal it and remove everything else that doesn’t support it. Clarity comes from selection and focus.

Considering the opposite sharpens that process. It shows what could go wrong, what might be ignored and what fails under pressure. Once you see those things, it becomes difficult to go back to thinking the same way again.