It's Not a Wheel.
It's a Carousel

The Wheel

If you haven't seen Mad Men, here is the setup, in plain terms. Kodak has built a new slide projector. Their engineers call it “the wheel,” because that is what it is: a wheel that turns and shows your photos, one by one. They bring it to an advertising agency and say: it's new technology, help us sell the innovation.

Don Draper, the agency's creative lead, does the opposite. He loads the projector with photos of his own family. His wedding. His kids. And he tells the room that the strongest bond a customer can have with a product isn't newness at all. It's nostalgia: the ache to go back to a place you love.

Then the line. It's not called the wheel. It's called the carousel.

Same machine. Same price. Same wheel turning inside it. But now it isn't a projector anymore. It's a time machine for your family. One of the clients walks out in tears. The rest cancel their meetings with the other agencies.

That is positioning. Deciding what your product really is, in the customer's world, before you write a single word about it.

Please remember that order. It matters more than anything else in this piece.

The Carousel

Here is the problem with most software messaging: they sell the wheel. Go and look at ten SaaS homepages today. You will find the same sentence on eight of them: “The AI-powered platform to streamline your workflows.” Swap the logo and nobody would notice. It is grammatically perfect and it says nothing.

Why does this happen? Because the people closest to the product describe the product. The engineers at Kodak weren't wrong because it really was a wheel. They were just answering the wrong question. They answered “what is it?” when the buyer is asking “what does it do for me?”

And here is the part where things go south. When you sell the wheel, you invite the buyer to compare wheels. Speed, specs, price. You have turned your product into a commodity, on purpose, in your own pitch. The buyer opens a spreadsheet, puts you in a column next to three competitors, and the cheapest wheel wins.

Draper refused to be in that spreadsheet. A carousel has no comparison column. It is a category of one.

Same product. Different frame. A completely different negotiation.

Two Distinct Jobs

Now the uncomfortable and complex part. Most companies think they have a messaging problem. They usually have a positioning problem, and the difference is where the money leaks. Let's take the two apart.

Positioning is a decision. It answers four questions: who is this for, what problem does it solve, what would they do without us, and why do we win? That is strategy. It belongs to the CEO.

Messaging is the words. The headline, the pitch, the one-liner. That is expression. It comes after.

The ugly truth: you cannot fix the second one without the first. I see it constantly. A company hires a copywriter, or points an AI tool at the website, and asks for “sharper messaging.” The words get prettier. The problem stays. Because nobody ever decided what the company is actually positioned against.

“It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel” is a great line. But the line is not the work. The work was the decision underneath it: we are not in the projector business, we are in the memory business. Draper made that decision first. The words took care of themselves.

Great copy on top of no decision is paint on a leaky boat.

The twist: the pitch only worked because it was true

Here is one more thing about that scene. It tends to get missed.

While Don sells this warm picture of family, his own marriage is falling apart. He goes home that night to an empty house. The show is telling you something: the story and the reality don't have to match. For now at least.

In your business, they do. A projector that genuinely delivers that living-room moment can carry the carousel story forever. A product that can't deliver its story gets found out in ninety days. The customer feels the gap, the renewal doesn't come, and your own sales team stops believing the pitch before the market does.

So the rule is simple. Position as high as the product can prove. One inch higher and you haven't positioned: you've promised. And promises get invoiced later, as churn does.

The proof: a carousel from this decade

If this feels like a trick from the sixties, but it isn't. The best recent example is a company called Clay.

Strip Clay down to the machine and it is a spreadsheet that pulls prospect data from 150-plus sources. Useful. But “data enrichment tool” is a wheel. It puts you in a comparison column next to Apollo and ZoomInfo, competing on records per euro.

So Clay refused the category. Their story: go-to-market is becoming an engineering discipline and something you design, build, and automate, not a stack of manual tasks. And then they went one step further than Draper. They didn't just rename the product. They named the person who uses it: the GTM Engineer. A job title that did not exist.

It worked. Practitioners put the title on their profiles. Communities formed around it. Other companies started hiring GTM Engineers: around a hundred job listings for the role now go live every month. Clay went from roughly $1 million to $100 million in annual revenue in about two years, and when they raised at a $3.1 billion valuation in 2025, the funding story led with the category, not the feature list.

Notice what they sold. Not the spreadsheet. Not the integrations. A new way to think about the buyer's own job with their product as the only serious way to do it. Kodak got a carousel. Clay's customers got a profession.

And the rule from the last section held. The product could prove the story and technical operators really could build things with it that they couldn't build elsewhere. That is why the category stuck.

So what should you do?

You don't need an agency for this. You need to make three decisions, in this order.

1.  Decide what business you are really in.

Not what the product is but what it does in the customer's life. Ask ten customers who chose you: what was going on when you started looking, and what did you compare us to? Your carousel is usually hiding in their words, not yours. You just have to name it.

2.  Pick one idea and drop the rest.

Draper said nothing about bulb life or build quality. One idea, total conviction. If your homepage has six value propositions, you have zero. Positioning is subtraction. It should hurt a little.

3.  Test it where money changes hands.

Not in a survey. Put the new story in the first two minutes of every sales call for a month. Watch for one signal above all: do prospects start repeating your words back to you? When the market says “carousel” without being asked, you own it.

None of this needs a bigger budget and that's the good news. Your product already does something worth wanting. The only question is whether you're selling the wheel or the carousel. One is a machine in a spreadsheet. The other is the reason to buy. Same product. Your choice.