When your marketing stops working, it could be a number of things. But being a story-oriented creative, when someone says this to me I immediately think about positioning.
We wrote about Anthropic’s first big brand campaign when it launched back in September in The Dose. But this is such a good case study to examine that I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
What Anthropic (and its creative agency, Mother) has done not only sets up their brand for years of marketing that all ties to one big idea, but also gives us a playbook for positioning that we don’t often see from tech companies (aside from the obvious master, Apple).
Here’s the jist:
Anthropic launched a campaign under the tagline, “Keep thinking.” Here’s the video. And here’s the rationale from Mother’s website:
“The message speaks directly to the problem solvers—those who can’t walk past a challenge without engaging. The people up at 3am because they can’t let go of an idea. The people who don’t stop at good enough. ‘Keep thinking’ reinforces Claude as the model for those who want AI to amplify their thinking, rather than replace it.”
If your marketing is stalled and you can’t seem to push a meaning about your brand out into the marketplace beyond your color palette or your product category, Anthropic’s campaign offers some instructions to learn from.
- More than a sales pitch. Not just a vapid tagline that doesn’t mean anything. Or an empty promise we’ve all heard before. “Keep thinking” positions Anthropic as an AI company that is for amplifying human thought and capability, not replacing it — the existential worry on everyone’s minds. This is strong positioning because it is culturally aware, bigger than the technology itself, and more about the customer than the company.
- “Keep thinking” is a call to join a movement, not just to choose one platform over another. This rally cry taps into a belief system that says, we believe this technology has the capability to take humans further. We are for the progress of humanity and human thought. There is a good side to this thing that feels ominous and dark, and together we are it.
- It bypasses benefits. Anthropic had already done the usual round of tech marketing with headlines like “Powerful, fast, or safe. Pick three.” “The AI with people skills.” and “Move your work up and to the Claude.” Unsurprisingly, no one cared. They remained another AI company with little discernible difference.
- “Keep thinking,” on the other hand, invites people into a shared belief system. To the point that thousands of those people would line up to get a hat with this tagline on it, and then actually wear it. “Keep thinking” taps into a person’s self-image, and invites them to be part of something larger than an LLM that can write good emails and perhaps one day replace them.
- This is not safe by any means. Strong positioning is rarely safe. If your positioning is safe, then you are very likely positioned exactly as your competitors are and therefore impossible to tell apart. And what is the point of that? Why even bother with positioning? You could sail along and do and say the exact same things everyone else in your category is doing. But you’ll always be lumped in with them, good or bad. Effective branding is never going to feel good at first because it means you are stepping out of the usual playbook and into the unknown.
- “Keep thinking” is born from taking a point of view and identifying an enemy. In Anthropic’s case, that enemy is mindless AI slop — shortcuts, machines replacing humans, assembly-line dystopias, and doing things quickly. It’s clear Anthropic didn’t set out to target everyone. They wanted to send a signal to pull forth those who share this point of view: That to think is to be human. And that this technology should support that truth, never supplant it.
If the point of positioning is to find a place in your market’s mind that is distinctly yours, then every step of the way may actually feel antithetical to what you know about marketing. Your team is likely to put up a fight because it’s so different. Your product people will protest over the lack of features and mentions of speed and performance. Your marketing people may feel uncomfortable saying anything negative (which can sometimes be necessary to identify an enemy and articulate a point of view in opposition).
Without these things, however, in most cases, you don’t have a strong position. Maybe you’re the top or the bottom or the biggest or the smallest in your market. But those positions don’t mean anything to anyone outside your company.
Maybe by now you’re thinking this…
What if my company doesn’t have a “Keep thinking”? Maybe there is no latent or active enemy. Maybe there’s no big stakes or cultural seed to tap. You can still carve a position if you’re willing to be bold. You could pick a human emotion and position around that. (Think: Coke’s “Open happiness” or McDonalds’ “I’m lovin’ it” or LG’s “Life’s good.”)
Or you could just stick to tactics and channels, and push the same marketing through different mediums and see what happens. (Hey, sometimes this works too.)
But if your marketing’s not working anymore… it’s probably time for a new approach. Repositioning may be worth considering.
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