Should You Position as a Vitamin or an Aspirin – or a Fruit Shake?

If you’re of a certain age – and by certain age I mean mine or older – you likely receive a lot of social media ads for stretching, yoga, and related mobility programs. These systems aim to help people to improve their flexibility through routines, techniques, or tools. 

I should appreciate these programs a lot. I’m a little too tall for my own good, which means I used to have back complaints. So, I should be quite responsive to them. What’s interesting about the pitches for these products is that they fall into two main categories. 

• We can help you to reduce the back pain you feel right now!
• We can help you to regain the mobility you once had!

Which is most motivating to me might have depended on the day I’m having. Maybe my back is bothering me today: pain relief would be welcome. Maybe there isn’t any pain, but it was tough to get up from a chair: help me get that mobility back!

Is an Aspirin Better than a Vitamin?

There’s a classic bit of received wisdom about comparing product value. If your product is a ‘vitamin’, then it is speaking about the benefit of renewed health over time. “Take this supplement,” the pitch might go, “and after some period you will see improved health benefits. Though those benefits may be difficult to recognize.”

The polar opposite approach is the aspirin strategy. “Take this pill,” the alternative suggests, “and your headache will vanish immediately.” We’ve been taught that the aspirin strategy is always right. The urgency to eliminate pain that is occurring now is much greater than the desire to improve some future outcome. Some people even suggest that the vitamin strategy is up to ten times more difficult than the aspirin strategy. 

That shouldn’t be a surprise. We see that in other studies as well, that people are significantly more responsive to pain avoidance than to trying to get benefit. You see it in risk avoidance too, where even solid odds in favor of winning a large prize often don’t overcome smaller risks of losing a nominal amount. 

This benefit seeking versus pain avoidance dichotomy is a difficult one to know how to balance for a marketer. Yes, we’ve been traditionally told that we should always be an aspirin when possible. However, some studies describe a more nuanced view. They say that in some cultures and some situations, a vitamin strategy may actually be more effective. 

Is it Fish or Fowl? Aspirin or Vitamin

Let’s take the example of corporate internet security. Here we’ll think about an IT team that is trying to determine which purchase to make now. Either an email filtering technology or a hack prevention software.

Let’s look at the aspirin option first. All day long, IT sees wave after wave of inappropriate or malicious spam emails. IT has to spend time setting up filters, cleaning them out, responding to workers’ problems caused by these emails, and more. By filtering these emails out before they arrive at workers’ computers, you are resolving an issue with immediate effect. 

The aspirin strategy works by showing how big the current pain is – cleaning filters, lots of help tickers, etc. – and then showing how much the volume of bad email traffic has been reduced. 

So, does that mean that email filtering is always going to win?

Now, let’s look at a different kind of internet security for businesses: avoiding hacks. Here there isn’t instant gratification. You’re building an effective wall to keep threats out. And like a guard on top of a castle, there’s a lot of waiting around for threats to come. You’re letting in lots of farmers with carts filled with vegetables, so to speak. And only rarely – if ever – does an outlaw come along to try to storm your walls. 

There’s a serious temptation to put off buying the hack prevention software. It’s a problem that may or may not ever come. You may or may not know if it ever paid off. So, it’s easy to focus on the immediate pain of reducing unwanted emails.

At least that’s what we’ve been told. But the reality is more nuanced. The vitamin-vendor of hack prevention software can position more effectively. As companies get larger, there is an increased pressure to avoid embarrassing the team. The value of a company’s brand equity is higher and the risk of negative media coverage is also greater as the company increases in size. So, the pressure to avoid a hack increases.

Similarly, as the internal security team sees itself as an interdependent member of the broader team, it will prioritize activities that support the whole organization. 

So, while manually filtering out bad emails may be annoying, letting down the entire company as the result of a breach becomes much more important. The more a team or person feels themselves to be part of an interdependent whole the more they will be likely to take a ‘vitamin’ by preferring to purchase the hack prevention software. 

So, the conclusion is that sometimes you might want to position your offer as a vitamin and sometimes an aspirin. But is that really effective?

Vitamin or Aspirin? It’s Both

Yes, you can build campaigns that vary your pitch depending on the likely need of your prospect. A pain-centered message for someone with an urgent problem. A benefit-centered message for someone in an interdependent or non-urgent situation. 

The problem with parsing your message to two different audiences isn’t that you can’t do it or it doesn’t work. You can certainly construct successful campaigns that split your positioning. But that means that you don’t have a single mission around which you can build momentum, a story, and direction for your business.

Let’s re-compare the two alternative IT solutions:

Aspirin: Malicious emails cause lots of work → I want better filtering now

Vitamin: There could be a hack in the future → I want to prevent hacks that might come later

You’ve likely started to see something funny about trying to split these two positionings. While we’re meant to think that they are mutually exclusive in terms of time scales and urgency, they aren’t. 

• We’re meant to think that aspirin solutions are best suited for solving immediate pains, like reducing unnecessary work, avoiding fines, etc. But aspirin can have long-term health benefits too, like its possible benefits for your heart.
• We’re also meant to think that vitamins are about the future only. But as anyone who’s ever had an iron deficiency will tell you, a vitamin can turn your life around pretty fast.

Returning to the IT scenario. Let’s step out of the polar argument between aspirins and vitamins. 

Malicious emails aren’t just annoying for IT because they clog filters and cause a lot of support tickets. They also cause longer term and less definable problems like worker distraction. And, critically, they are the most significant vector for hacks via phishing. That means that email filtering isn’t simply reducing work for IT teams. It’s also preventing the risk of hackers breaching your walls via email. 

So, email filtering now is not simply an aspirin, it’s also a vitamin. That gives email filtering technology a decided edge. Vendors can position the immediacy of their value while also focusing on the serious benefits that come over the long term through increased protection. This will have major impacts on their constructing of a narrative around the challenges of phishing attacks.

Position as a Fruit Shake

Determining how you own the market shouldn’t come down to resolving pain or encouraging long term benefits. I like to think of the most effective positioning as being in between these two. Think about a fruit shake. It’s filling, easy to consume, and tastes fantastic. So, there is an immediate benefit that comes from drinking one. 

But there’s also a long-term value in that you’re getting protein, vitamins, and antioxidants! By positioning a health drink as having both long and short term benefits to you, it manages to win in both scenarios. 

Does that create confusion for the buyer because it is not solely aspirin or vitamin? Of course not. It reduces complexity by removing the cons from the table while preserving the pros. As a buyer, you don’t need to choose between short term and long term. You get both. 

And that’s precisely what we did with the IT security scenario. We avoided a debate about reducing short-term work for IT versus avoiding long-term risk. Instead, we created a position that allows us to win in both scenarios with less work for IT teams through less clogged filters and fewer tickets, while also avoiding the risks of hacks that come through phishing. 

So, don’t be a vitamin or an aspirin. Be a fruit shake.