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20 April 2022 • Joanna Schull

Category Leadership Branding at the Edge

The thrill of discovery

One of the more exhilarating aspects of working with product-proven B2B technology and AI companies is helping them make sense of where they fit in a market that may not yet have language for what they’ve built. Sometimes there’s a clear way to position an offering within an existing category while giving the company distinct ownership of a particular territory. Other times, the company has built something the existing category simply doesn’t describe.

That can create a Belief Gap: the distance between what a company has actually built and what the market is prepared to recognize and understand. If the market only has an outdated or incomplete category frame to work from, it may never fully grasp the scope, value, or ambition of the offering.

Closing that gap can require more than sharper positioning. It can mean reframing the category landscape so the company can lead an existing category, disrupt its boundaries, or define a new one entirely.

When it’s not clear what ‘it’ is called

We see this across multiple industries, but it is particularly true when technologies outpace their categories. Nomenclature and vocabulary don’t always keep up with advancements in the industry, especially for companies innovating in ways that go beyond traditional definitions. And the result is that a company’s offering gets mislabeled with nomenclature that describes a box that doesn’t fit what they do. They could be put in a category that’s shrinking or not reflective of where they’re leading the market. And this has an impact on how people categorize the offering and how customers connect with the company. AI is intensifying this problem: AI systems synthesize their understanding of a company from whatever record is publicly available, and when that record is stale, contradictory, or generic, the resulting interpretation defaults to the nearest familiar—and often inaccurate—category.

This is when a company needs a technology descriptor. It’s not a name or a tagline, but rather the most important piece of nomenclature you can invest in. It helps customers quickly understand what category you play in. It signals to the press and analysts how you are challenging the status quo. And it names the territory you are claiming in the marketplace. Most importantly, a technology descriptor provides a handle that immediately describes what your product does—in a way that implies its value and begins closing the distance between what you’ve actually built and how the market currently understands you.

Why this matters in category leadership

Positioning a brand (and messaging, and copy) without an agreed-upon technology descriptor is problematic—internally and externally. From an internal perspective, the process of coming up with a technology descriptor requires that leaders are aligned not only on how to articulate what they do but also where they want to go. The technology descriptor puts a stake in the ground of where a company wants to take a leadership position. Too high-level, and it doesn’t differentiate. Too specific, and it constrains future evolution. And this is first and foremost a strategic leadership conversation. Externally, a technology descriptor defines the category you want to either redefine or create. It can serve as a declaration of the territory you are claiming, or where you believe the industry needs to go. And it gives your brand a first-mover advantage for storytelling, positioning, and category and thought leadership.

The solve

Coming up with a technology descriptor requires more than a brainstorming session that produces a catchy phrase. It’s more about defining the DNA of your offering and projecting how you want to grow and evolve your relationships with customers. To do this, we recommend looking at the business strategy and competitive analysis and seeking to understand how your new offering is different from what competitors offer or the current status quo.

A good technology descriptor needs to do a few things:

Differentiate your offering from existing players. This is a good place to use language that expresses a strength or differentiator, which will come into play when you do your positioning.
Offer elasticity and expansion potential based on your known or presumed strategic plans.
Balance the familiar with the new. It’s a good idea to use some terms that will ground your technology descriptor in ideas that people can immediately understand.
Get people excited about there being something new and better in this space. The ideal technology descriptor names the offering that people have been waiting for. It should give them a reason to rejoice.

A note about sequencing

Ideally, the technology descriptor should be determined before starting the Brand Positioning process, as knowing what ‘it’ is that you’re positioning is generally helpful and will then inform the positioning statement and brand pillars. Together, the Technology Descriptor, Brand Positioning Statement, and Pillars form the Strategic Core upon which to develop the rest of your brand’s assets.