What is MEH?
Matt Hodkinson
Helping consultancies accelerate growth with unrivalled positioning and messaging.
What is MEH?
Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember MEH from such programmes as The Simpsons.
And if that didn't cover all bases... MEH is listening to a backseat driver drone on.
It's watching paint dry for a whole weekend.
It's sitting in traffic (like my 6.5-hour journey home from Cheltenham on Sunday, thanks to a "bit of snow").
It's accepting cookies.
It's Harry Kane's second penalty outcome ??.
And it's a theme we've been rallying against recently, since our mission is to help ambitious consultancies to ditch the dull. So much so, that we're embarking on a rebrand of our own in 2023 (sorry Claire Hunter )!
So what makes a consultancy, MEH?
Something we call, "twinning, not winning". That is, sounding and looking exactly like your competitors.
You know when you're having a content blank, and you don't know what to write next, so you look to your competitor's sites for, "inspiration"? That's MEH.
Or when you're going through a website redesign, and your designer asks you to share examples of sites you like, and you send them straight to the company you last lost out to? Also MEH.
Have you ever delivered a really uninspiring and unexceptional service to clients? You guessed it! MEH
The history of MEH
According to extensive research , 11th April 1954 is deemed the most boring day in history (there was a general election in Belgium, Professor Atalar was born, and Jack Shufflebotham died) - but don't be fooled, because I'm here to remind you that the most boring day in history was the last time you sent a message to a prospect, and got completely ghosted.
Interestingly, in 1938, psychologist Joseph Ephraim Barmack studied the way factory workers coped with boredom, and the tedium of being factory workers. The solution was stimulation - more specifically: caffeine, amphetamines and ephedrine.
More recently, research conducted in 2010 found that people who are more easily bored, are 2.5x more likely to die of heart disease, than people who are not.
So let's put all of the above into a business context:
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Enter the caffeine fix: positioning
Positioning
Positioning is all about how you put a spin on your solution and offering. It's frame dependence.
In this example, the same thing (yoghurt) is being sold. But by shaking things up and repositioning the label, "80% fat free" suddenly sounds exponentially more appealing than "20% fat".
Better yet, you don't need to be the shiniest new consultancy on the block, to be appealing.
You can take a really boring solution, a dull business model, or a bog-standard transformation... And completely reposition it to the point that it becomes stimulating. Just ask our clients. ??
I'll look to the accounting industry to further cement my point...
I think the majority of us can agree that accounting, for most of us, is pretty boring. But it's one of those things that we can't avoid, and it has to get done.
Enter: The Wow Company . A B2B consultancy in a highly competitive industry, selling a boring solution, but in a transformational way.
Their service is 11/10. Their website is killer. Their events are 'all-out'. They sound different to every other accountancy.
Sound familiar? Of course not. You're probably not there just yet.
But the point of this article is about helping you to recognise the problem, first.
Your transformation won't happen over night. But you can make a start on it in 3 minutes.
Below is a link to take The Growth Positioning Diagnostic:
The tool has been designed to diagnose how different your consultancy is when it comes to:
There are 21 questions, and at the end of it you'll receive a completely customised report based on your differentiability, with actionable tips for being less MEH, and more unMEHlievable.
Hippity hop to it >> https://totalgrowthownership.com/growth-positioning-diagnostic