Category as a frame of reference
A brand’s frame of reference is the foundation of its positioning. It will determine the points of parity the brand has to meet in order to be considered a legitimate player, and highlight opportunities to differentiate. As such, your brand needs to fit into the framework of a brand category that people understand and relate to in order to really ‘get’ your brand. As UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff explains, a frame of reference is absolutely essential—get it wrong and your difference may be ignored: “Framing provides a mental structure that shapes the way we see the world. If a strongly held frame doesn’t fit the facts, the facts will be ignored.”
That’s just as true for the AI systems now doing a growing share of that framing on the market’s behalf. When AI models can’t recognize a new category, they default to the closest existing one—so an unclear frame doesn’t just get overlooked by people anymore. It gets flattened by machines, too.
It’s human nature to want to fit things into a category. The more innovative and disruptive your offering is, the more it needs a frame that people can relate to. If your brand can’t easily be defined, people often push it to the margins and leave it there. This is because its complexity is easier to ignore than to figure out. And when the category people assign to you is too narrow for the company you’ve become, your ambition, capability, and value can all be underestimated as a result.
People hold on tightly to their established understandings of what a category is and what it offers. Choosing the right category is about defining, or framing, what people are buying in such a way that your value shines through. The goal is to identify the best category that will help your customers “get” your value and make it relevant to them, while putting your competitors at a disadvantage. Get the frame right, and you help close what we call The Belief Gap—the distance between the company you’ve actually built and the company the market is prepared to recognize, believe, and price. Get it wrong, and no amount of positioning work underneath it will close that gap on its own.
When your brand category isn’t serving your brand
If you are looking to grow your business, make sure the brand category you align with is still the right one for the brand. For some brands, the category they originally aligned with stops serving their needs. If you meet any of the following criteria, it might be time to break out of your current category and become a new breed of category creators developing new markets with innovative technology and products.
- You are altering your strategic direction and your business model is shifting.
- Your product or offering is misunderstood by prospects and partners.
- You have created a significant innovation or proprietary advantage.
- Competition is stifling your ability to grow.
- Your current category prevents your key differences from standing out as ‘must haves.’
- Your category is in crisis or has fallen out of favor.
- You are ready to extend your brand beyond current customer segments.
What these situations have in common is a growing distance between the business you’re building and the way the market understands it. You may have outgrown the category, moved beyond what you were once known for, or found that different audiences have formed different ideas of what the company is. In other cases, a competitor may simply have claimed the clearer position. Whatever the cause, when your category starts obscuring more than it clarifies, it’s a strong sign that the frame itself needs to change.
It’s time to create a new brand category
Creating a new brand category might be the best way to position your brand for success. But creating a new category is incredibly hard. For most companies, it’s hard enough to explain what your product does and how it’s different from your competitors. And the task of explaining and defending a new product category can be too much for many companies to take on.
However, the rewards of creating a new category are great. Research shows that companies that create their own categories can capture a disproportionate share of market growth. Category creators experience much faster growth and receive much higher valuations from investors than companies bringing only incremental innovations to market. Category creation is one of the clearest value-defining moments a company can create for itself—a point where the market’s understanding of who you are directly shapes how you’re valued.
Category creators must be fearless and confident in their ability to lead the category, build momentum quickly, and maintain a reputation as the category leader over time. Before creating a new category, consider whether your business has the resources and time available. Don’t just define a new category for your brand—brand the category itself. That’s the difference between awareness and recognition—becoming understood, valued, and priced for the category you created, not just credited with naming it. In the end, creating a new category can be transformational for your brand and business if you do it well. Look for the best practices for defining a new category and what mistakes to avoid in our upcoming post.
Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
