New Brand Category Archives

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.

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.