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Tag: Brand Category

Brand Positioning: Why Now?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Reasons to Invest in Brand Positioning

There are many reasons why a brand might need to invest in brand positioning. In our work, we see businesses thinking about repositioning for many reasons. Sales might be declining. Your target audience may have shifted. You may have realized you’re targeting the wrong people. Your product roadmap has evolved. Competitors may have entered your space and you can’t seem to differentiate your value. Maybe, customers even perceive your brand as outdated or irrelevant. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a number of ecosystems overcrowding. As a result, it’s almost impossible to differentiate one brand from another. This makes it hard for continued growth and even harder to get the valuations most companies are looking for.

There is a diverse array of reasons to consider a brand positioning project for your business. Investing in brand positioning can better situate your business to achieve the business goals you are looking to achieve.

So, Is it Time to Reposition?

Even outside the volatile technology world, many companies are repositioning as a result of market shifts, emerging technology, and ruthless competition. It’s hard to know when it’s the right time to reposition. Be cognizant of whether your brand is working hard enough to support the kind of growth you are looking for. Look for early warning signs and don’t disregard a slow-down. Here are some top signs that indicate it might be time to reposition:

  • Your category is outdated or no longer fits the projection of your business.
  • You aren’t reaching the people you need to, or your key audiences have shifted.
  • The market is defining you differently than how you want to be defined.
  • Your business is no longer aligned to your brand strategy.
  • Your messaging is inconsistent and not doing the work you need it to.
  • Growth has stalled.
  • You are being out-marketed, out-branded, and out-sold.

Investing in a brand positioning project could be one of the best return on investments for your business and your brand – driving growth, fostering alignment, and situating your business and brand to thrive in even the most competitive of landscapes.

Brand Positioning, Done Right

Positioning your business correctly helps separate your brand from its competitors. Because getting to the heart of customers’ rational and emotional needs situates your brand to hold more meaning with the people who you want to reach, you allow your brand’s value to ring true and deposition even your strongest competitors. Clearly articulating your inherent distinction as a brand is valuable. It enables your business to always be on the offense.

Strong positioning also helps define where you stand as a brand. By creating focus and resolution around where you stand, you elevate your value proposition and drive ROI.

Brand positioning requires understanding your target audiences and their needs, identifying your category, and being incredibly clear about what you do, how you are different, and what value you deliver that nobody else can. So by developing a strong brand positioning, you enable everyone within your company to execute in their roles more easily.

In addition, rolling out a clear brand positioning externally will help your stakeholders understand your value proposition more clearly. You’ll find that this clarity will motivate your sales and marketing teams with a renewed energy. You will see revenues climb again and you’ll meet business goals with greater ease.

Customers’ needs will shift and sales challenges will occur. As things shift and challenges arise (and they will), having a strong stake in the market with your new brand position will help your business keep pace – delivering exactly what your business needs to create a dynamic, adaptable, and agile brand.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

How to Launch a New Brand Category

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Launching A New Brand Category

The decision to join an existing category, or to launch a new brand category is not an easy decision. Evaluating your product maturity, the product roadmap, and overall market maturity is critical. Once the decision is made, the strategy shifts to creating the right budget and plan to launch the new brand category. Building momentum is paramount to both the category’s success, and by proxy, your own brand’s position as the category leader.

As we’ve previously discussed, timing is critical for launch. You need to consider factors of competition, messaging, production and market forces. And when the light is green, launching a new brand category with your brand as the de facto leader means getting buy-in, quickly. Building momentum for your new category, attracting important users and creating buzz necessitates its own strategy, one that has to be developed concurrently with defining and naming the new category.

Why New Brand Category Launches Fail

Just because you have a brilliant name doesn’t mean your category will be adopted. In fact, most fail. Lack of preparation, especially when it comes to budgeting, often results in categories that fizzle out. Businesses are often so focused on designing, manufacturing, and promoting their own product that they postpone the effort needed to market a newly developed category. And before they know it, it’s too late. The new category launch needs to lead your brand into the arena, not the other way around.

Common mistakes for launch include not creating enough context for the category, making claims about the category that fall short, failing to create enough distinction from competitive categories, missing the mark on customer education (people just don’t get it), or jumping the gun on timing. Creating a new brand category requires the same rigor as launching a new brand or new product.

When developing your strategy for launching a new category, these five tactics are key. 

1. Be Consistent with Messaging

Just as you’ve developed and tested messaging around your brand, developing the messaging around your new brand category is equally important. Consistency is everything. In order to build traction, you’ll need competition, influencers, and customers to grab onto a clear and concise message. Everyone needs to be on the same page about what the category is, why it’s better than the alternative, and why it matters. It may be tempting to embellish the messaging with claims that make it sounds remarkable, but don’t. You’ll need messaging that is repeatable, authentic, and true to your brand in order to be picked up by your audience. Test the category messaging, and assuming it’s working, stick to it.

2. Generate Competition

It may sound counterintuitive, but when you are creating a category, competition helps legitimize a market and increases the size of the pie. Your brand will actually benefit if others are spending their marketing dollars to help popularize the value of what you are doing. The key, however, is to be first to market (see #1: owning the messaging around the category) – and continue to find ways to elevate yourself above the crowd, while maintaining both a product and thought leadership position.

3. Tap Into Influential Early Adopters

The snowboard surpassed the snurfer as a category when Burton came onto the scene with a posse of well-known surfers and skaters who were early adaptors of the new sport. They were not only the target audience for snowboarding. They had enough cultural clout to make snowboarding popular. When launching a new category, finding ambassadors with strong reputations will help raise awareness for and substantiate your category.

4. Popularize

Otherwise known as PR. Keep in mind that the category is the focus of the PR efforts, not your brand. Focus on cultivating buzz around the category in an authentic way. This requires some restraint on behalf of your brand. Drawing too much attention to your brand right out of the gate is a misstep. This is because people won’t yet have a way of talking about it. So create context first. Then, generate conversations around the category with a strong media presence (industry influencers, bloggers, press, and social media should all be activated). The buzz around your brand will follow.

5. Educate Customers

Host conferences and events – both in person and online ­–  that use the category name. Educating customers about the category should be the central driver for marketing. Build your reputation without overselling yourself. Establishing industry user groups with digital meetups are powerful ways to spark conversations and create groundswell with a wide audience. With enough momentum, your brand’s leadership will be in position as a thought leader. And further embedding the category and subsequently your brand in customer’s minds.

The Rewards of a Strategic Category Launch

Identifying a new category and building it from scratch can serve as a powerful path to growth for your brand. And the effort involved pays off. Category creators experience fast growth and receive high valuations from investors. Creating a new category, your brand will be in a solid position to surpass the competition. Or break into a flooded market. On top of that, your brand will be positioned to own the category as the de facto leader. Category creation is nothing short of a game changer.

This post is the 4th in series on brand category creation. Learn When to Create a New Brand Category, How to Create a New Brand Category, and Naming a New Brand Category.

Download our White Paper on Brand Category Creation.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

The Pros and Cons of Launching a New Category

Posted on by Chris Ames

What’s Old Is New Again

People have been drinking coffee, listening to music, and shopping for groceries forever. But if you peered into the modern household, chances are these common operations would look completely foreign to someone ten years ago. One might load a coffee pod while streaming an album from their phone, then ask their voice assistant to add something to their online cart.

This is the brave new world of brand category creation, and it’s something that we’ve written about extensively. The reason we spend so many words on this topic is that it’s absolutely paramount to sustained, long-term growth.

Build Upon a Frame of Reference

As a quick refresher, a brand’s frame of reference is the foundation of its positioning. Think of it as the set of hurdles a brand must be able to leap to be considered a legitimate player. People need a frame of reference in order to understand and approach your offering. As UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff explains, “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.”

So, while coffee pods and streaming services are technically new, it’s still just coffee and music: two beautiful, sturdy frames of reference to build upon. That’s the delicate art of launching a new category. It’s not that you’re trying to invent something completely from scratch, but rather building a new path to a known, beloved experience. Asking your customer to take an imaginative leap is a dangerous thing. You want to make sure that they land on something comfortable.

The Pros

When done right, the rewards are huge. Harvard Business Review examined Fortune’s list of the 100 fastest-growing U.S. companies from 2009 to 2011 and found that the 13 companies that were instrumental in creating their categories accounted for 53% of the incremental revenue growth and 74% of incremental market capitalization growth over those three years.

“The message is clear,” says Eddie Yoon, “category creators experience much faster growth and receive much higher valuations from investors than companies bringing only incremental innovations to market.”

The Cons

When done wrong, of course, the backlash is swift and unrelenting. You might remember Bodega, a glorified vending machine that positioned itself as “reinventing the Mom and Pop store.” Silicon Valley is infamous for touting so-called innovations that, more often than not, are only techy-twists on an existing category. This combination of hubris and mislabeling will immediately turn-off your customer.

If launching a new category is so treacherous, why take the risk? Wouldn’t it be better to just give people what they already want? The issue is, what people want – and the medium in which they prefer it – is always changing. As Al Ries writes, “a brand is the tip of an iceberg. How big and how deep the iceberg is will determine how powerful the brand is. The bottom of the iceberg is the category. If it melts, the brand will melt, too.”

Trying to Hit a Moving Target

Look at Kodak. What’s a Kodak? Why only the world’s best film-photography brand. Unfortunately for Kodak, the film photography iceberg has steadily melted ever year – and with it, Kodak’s brand awareness, influence, and stock price. It’s not that people have stopped taking pictures, so why wasn’t Kodak able to make the digital jump? They stayed relentlessly focused on brand instead of observing how the category was shifting.

Competing against other brands and giving people what they want now is a short-term play. Competing against the category you’re in and giving people what they’ll need for tomorrow is how you achieve sustained, long-term growth.

Take Citrix, a legacy software company founded in 1989. For decades, they have provided innovations like desktop virtualization and cloud computing. And for decades, that was enough to differentiate them. Cut to 2018, when everyone and their mother has a SaaS offering, and that is no longer the case. So, how did they respond? By leaning into the new brand category of “digital workspace” – a unified app that brings together the best of all their existing and future technologies.

Not only that, but they are doing the hard work that launching a new category entails: being consistent with messaging, generating competition, popularizing, tapping into early adopters, and educating customers.

Launching a new category isn’t for every brand, but if your product or offering is misunderstood, your competition is stifling your ability to grow, or your category has fallen out of favor, it’s time to consider a shift in strategy. In this fickle business, there’s no such thing as being permanently safe. Great brands are like sharks – you have to keep moving forward if you want to make it out alive.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

Category Creators: Creating a New Brand Category to Drive Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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. High0companies that created their own category accounted for 74% of incremental market capitalization growth from 2009 to 2011. Category creators experience much faster growth and receive much higher valuations from investors than companies bringing only incremental innovations to market.

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, but brand the category itself. 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.

Category Creators

This is the 1st in a series. Check to How to Create a New Brand Category, Naming a New Brand Category, and Launching a New Brand Category by downloading our White Paper on Brand Category Creation.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm working with high-growth technology companies.

Naming a New Brand Category is Harder Than it Looks

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Failed category labels are laughable. Before there were snowboards, there was snurfers. PDA phones preempted smartphones. Charga-plates rolled out before credit cards took their place. It seems obvious now why each current category name is so much stronger than its predecessor. But missing the mark with category naming is a mistake that’s easy to make.

In our last post about how to define a new category, we left off with what is most commonly considered the fun part of strategy: naming. If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve identified that your existing category isn’t serving your brand’s needs. You’re ready to make a shift and have accepted the risk of creating a new category. And, you’ve appropriated the time and budget necessary to do so.

What’s in a name?

Category names make it easy for people to familiarize themselves with products and brands. They help people make choices and create loyalty. They set expectations about why brands belong. When a category name resonates, it paves the way for brands to develop meaningful connections with people.

When developing a new category, it’s tempting to come up with a catchy, quirky, or unique category name. Everyone wants to differentiate and make a mark. It can seem, understandably, that developing a category name that grabs attention will help your brand stand out too. But that’s not the case. Names that aren’t recognizable create confusion and uncertainty for customers. When the category name isn’t immediately clear, the brands and products it represents become muddied in those waters.

As we described in a previous post, people need context to grab onto something new. The framework your category creates sets the stage for your innovative product to become the category leader. But that also depends on the name being something that people understand without explanation. What the heck is a snurfer? No one knew. But snowboard is easy. Anyone who surfs or skates immediately gets it. And, it was no coincidence that when Burton coined “snowboard” they were going after surfers and skaters as a target audience.

Simplicity is Key

When it’s time to create your new category name, choose one that’s simple and recognizable. There are a few ways to go about it:

  • Two Known Words: Credit Card, Data Center, Sports Drink
  • Compound Name: Automobile, Bicycle, Laptop
  • Derive a New Word from an Existing Word: Browser, E-commerce

The timing of a category launch should influence which direction the name should go. If your product is truly innovative — with nothing on the market that compares — the category name should be a riff off an existing product. In this case, using two known words or joining them into one would be ideal. But if your brand is joining a group of products that are currently on the market, the category should confirm and validate behavior (people were already browsing the internet so coining ‘browser’ made sense).

When there isn’t a dominant category name, different labels make it difficult for any brand to gain traction. Most people stay within a comfort zone and too many options lead people to ignore the category all together. A name represents the ‘rules of membership’ — the specific characteristics that the products within the category must have in order to belong to the category. Once a name achieves dominance, people know what to expect and the brands within its umbrella follow suit. In our next post on defining a category, we’ll share tips on how to get buy-in on your new category name with important users, innovators, and industry commentators to help ensure a successful roll-out.

This is the 3rd in a series. Check out When to Create a New Brand Category, How to Create a New Brand Category, and what goes into Launching a New Brand Category.

Download our White Paper on Brand Category Creation.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

How Do You Create a New Brand Category?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

All Signs Point to a New Brand Category

Traditional wisdom suggests that creating a new brand category is a massive undertaking. In our recent post on category change, we wrote about when it’s time to consider creating a new category. In that post we were clear: undergoing a category change is not something for the faint of heart. If you’re leading the effort, you’ll need thick skin, an iron will, and if you don’t have deep pockets, you’ll need to be extra resourceful.

Creating a new brand category requires big ideas that literally think outside the box — that’s the whole point. You’ll also need a team of decision makers who are comfortable with risk and ready to execute at a fast pace.

Resources, especially money, are another factor. Creating a new category does require an investment that may be exceed your business-as-usual marketing budget. And with that, comes more risk. It’s inevitable that some new categories flop or are slow to show return on investment.

Moving Forward

Regardless, category change still may be the best move for your brand and business. But, it doesn’t have to be a painful and scarily expensive process.

On the contrary, with a plan in place, tenacity, loads of creativity, and a clear vision, creating a new brand category is completely within reach. If there’s been a shift in your corporate strategy, product offering or the market, or if your category is having its own crisis, it could be time to break out. Creating and branding your own category is a proven way to drive your business forward.

Creating a category is a multi-step process that involves defining the category, naming it, and developing a roll-out strategy. Look to the following steps to define your new brand category:

Defining a New Brand Category

1. Research and analyze:

Have a deep understanding of the category dynamics in the current market. What direction is the market going? What’s the threshold for change amongst your target audience? Track the dynamics of existing category labels to determine when a window of opportunity will open up for a new category and give your company the best shot at succeeding. Use data to understand how customers are categorizing emerging brands to fine-tune your new category development.

2. Establish a budget:

Before getting too far down the road, make sure there’s a budget in place for the work you’re about to take on. Defining a new category also requires marketing the new category which can be a drain on resources. However, it certainly doesn’t have to break the bank. In fact, being able to make the most of a modest budget means you know how to be resourceful, creative, and think about things differently. Once you have a budget in place, the strategy of developing the category becomes easier to determine.

3. Choose a category:

You need to strategically develop a category for Evaluate your business strategy, the competitive set, your own product roadmap, and where your industry is heading. Remember, people need a framework. 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. To build groundswell around a new category, you’ve got to give people a frame of reference. Until your brand is established as the dominant leader of the category, most people will be reluctant to try something new. It’s human nature to play it safe. The more innovative and disruptive your offering is, the more it needs a frame that people can relate to.

4. Prove your brand is different:

When creating a new brand category, you need to engage your community in a consistent and meaningful way. It’s critical to demonstrate to the people important to your brand why your category matters, and how it offers something better than the existing category. Use the strongest parts of your brand to go beyond basic features and benefits. Prove your brand is poised to be the category leader because its purpose and promise are head and shoulders above the competition (and, there’s always competition). Your proof points will justify the new category and position your brand as the de facto leader, ready to take the stage.

After building the strategy for your new brand category, the hard work can begin: creating the right category name. We’ll identify the key factors to consider when ideating and securing a category name in our upcoming post.

This is the 2nd in a series. Check out When to Create a New Brand Category, Naming a New Brand Category, and Launching a New Brand Category.

Download our White Paper on Brand Category Creation.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.