Money. Pink Floyd (1973)
Roger Waters on greed, written by a band about to become extremely rich from it. The irony was noted at the time, including by Waters, and the song is more interesting for that than for its argument.
What the song is about
An unreliable narrator enumerating what money buys and what he intends to buy with it. The satire is obvious on the surface. What makes the song last is the production: it is built on a cash register loop in an unusual time signature, so the mechanism of transaction is literally the rhythm the song runs on.
That is a better piece of sound design about commerce than anything in advertising.
Why it belongs in a marketing reference
Two reasons, and the second is the real one.
It is the most commercially successful song about money ever recorded, from an album that sat on the charts for a decade and a half, which is a joke the band have never been able to escape.
More usefully: it is a case study in how a critique becomes a commodity. “Money” is now licensed, soundtracked, played in bars, and used in exactly the contexts it was attacking. Nothing about the song changed. The culture simply absorbed the criticism and sold it, which is the thing Franti warned about and the thing Neil Young refused to participate in.
The lesson for anyone building a brand on a critical position: the critique is absorbable. Being against something is not a durable differentiator, because the thing you are against can usually just buy the aesthetic.
The honest complication
Waters has been open about the contradiction and it does not really damage the song. Writing about greed while becoming rich is not hypocrisy, it is the only vantage point from which the subject is visible.
If you run the company rather than the marketing
The commercial idea here is that positioning against something is weaker than it feels.
Challenger positioning is attractive, particularly for a smaller firm. We are not like the big incumbents, we are transparent where they are opaque, we are senior-led where they are leveraged. It reads well and it wins meetings.
The problem is that it is borrowed. Your position is defined by what the incumbent does, so when they change, or simply adopt the language, your position evaporates and you have no independent description of yourself. Large firms adopt challenger language constantly and at no cost, because it is only language.
The durable version is a position that describes what you are rather than what you are against, and that would still make sense if every competitor disappeared tomorrow. That is harder to write and it is the only kind worth having.
Test: remove every comparative from your positioning statement. If nothing survives, you have a critique rather than a position.
Sources
Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, Harvest and Capitol, 1973. Written by Roger Waters.