Positioning Archives

Sometimes it’s hard to recognize that it’s time for a brand refresh. Why embark on a brand refresh if your business is successfully growing? Many product-proven companies grow organically, without any strategic direction. Things take off. Your team expands. New offices open. Your product line multiplies. And growth mode may happen without making plans for how the brand will accommodate and flex as the business develops.

At these times, decisions are often made that help an internal team manage change. In many cases, this means that some of the key brand components end up holding greater meaning for those inside of the company, but lack meaning for other key audiences—prospects, customers, and recruits—who also matter to the brand’s success.

The warning signs of a solely internal-facing brand are plenty: internal names for your product, add-on brands, or a website that has been pieced together, mirroring the evolution of the company. These common indicators show that important audiences have been forgotten. If this sounds familiar, your brand needs to start looking outside itself.

Forgetting Who’s Outside

The problem with an internal-facing brand is that the brand isn’t always clear or powerful to outsiders. The purpose of an impactful brand is to connect meaningfully with all the people who matter to your business—inside and out. So if a brand makes sense to your team but isn’t as easily understood by external audiences, your brand loses impact, and as a result, business eventually stagnates.

Sometimes all the effort that went into scaling your business becomes your brand strategy—making it very hard for outsiders to understand who you are, what you do, and why you matter. And when the people crucial to your business’s success don’t understand your brand, your business can easily fall behind the competition, risk becoming irrelevant and even lack the future support needed to move your brand and business forward.

Four Ways This Shows Up

This kind of mismatch between what your business has become and how the market understands it isn’t random—it tends to show up in one of four recognizable ways.

Seen as Smaller. Your company has grown—in ambition, capability, or platform—faster than the market’s understanding of it. You’ve built something bigger than the label people still put on you: a platform gets called a product, infrastructure gets called a feature. This is exactly the gap Category Reframing (#2 below) is built to close.

Seen as Older. The market is still picturing an earlier version of your business. You’ve expanded your platform, added AI, moved into new markets—but perception hasn’t caught up. Every conversation starts with correcting an outdated impression before you can talk about where you’re actually headed.

Seen in Fragments. Different parts of your company are telling different, technically accurate stories that never resolve into one coherent picture. Add-on brands, internal-only product names, a website stitched together as the business evolved—each piece makes sense from the inside, but from the outside, nothing quite adds up. This is the problem Brand Architecture (#1) and a real Strategic Narrative (#7) are built to solve.

Seen as a Follower. You have the substance to lead your category, but a competitor with a clearer, more consistent position is getting the credit for defining it—even though you did much of the pioneering work. Knowing your Competition (#6) matters, but so does making sure the market can actually tell the two of you apart.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s not a sign your business lacks value. It’s a sign the market’s understanding hasn’t caught up with what you’ve actually built—and that’s exactly what a brand refresh is for.

Time for a Brand Refresh

Consider these aspects of your strategy to refresh your brand and position your business for continued future growth.

1. Brand Architecture
For many product-proven companies, add-on brands have rendered your architecture irrelevant. Do you have one brand or many brands? A branded house? Or a house of brands? How do all of your products fit into the structure of your brand? Evaluate how all the different products, business units, and pieces of your brand fit together. Don’t let organic growth lead the way. Develop your brand architecture to help people understand your business, products, and services. Enable that architecture to work for today and accommodate tomorrow.

2. Category Reframing
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. Companies that have experienced organic growth oftentimes outgrow their original category without realizing it. As such, many product-proven companies will start in one category and need to shift into another over time. This shift might be necessitated by the advancement of products, the market, and/or a new category. Choosing the right category or defining a new one is critical to positioning your brand in a way that frames your value and makes it relevant to your customers. We like to think of category development as a process that helps clarify and shape the perceptions, feelings, and attitudes about your brand. Think about articulating the right metaphor that will make it easy for people to find meaning in your brand.

3. Positioning
Knowing how you want your brand represented, enforced, and reinforced is part of developing your positioning. A strong and meaningful positioning can enhance what your brand does, how it differs from your competitors, and why it’s better than any alternative in the market. Ensuring you have the right positioning strategy is critical to building your business.

4. Target Audience
Who is important to your brand? Who do you sell to? Who are your most important brand champions? Who are the key influencers? These are all important questions to answer during a brand refresh. For product-proven companies, the people who were important to your brand when you started have probably evolved. So take a critical eye and focus on understanding precisely who your target audience is, why you matter to them, what they are looking to solve, and how you can create messaging that speaks to their needs and desires.

5. Your Why
It’s critical to make sure you lead with ‘why’ during a brand refresh. Most likely the success of your business and its growth is the result of your purpose, or reason for being. Formalizing your purpose into a brand promise will help your growing team get aligned internally around why you matter. Everyone can get on board the same boat and row towards the same higher purpose. And when you align everyone internally and drive them towards that purpose, the people on the outside will feel your why as well. A brand is a way of bringing your purpose to life, so focus on it and how you can make people believe in your brand.

6. The Competition
In order to differentiate yourself and offer unique value to your audiences, you have to know your competition—inside and out. Who you were competing with when you started businesses has most likely entirely shifted, especially in the fast-paced business world we work in today. Map your current brand against the competition and shift accordingly.

7. Strategic Narrative
Investing in developing a Strategic Narrative helps everyone understand who you are, what you do, why you matter, and what the future holds for your business. If everyone internally has insight into this, it helps the external storytelling become clear and consistent. Your Strategic Narrative should help tell the story of your brand in an honest, meaningful, and emotive way.

8. Creative Assets
Oftentimes, making your brand more clear, powerful, and meaningful to key audiences means refreshing your visual identity (and from there, your website). Ensure your identity represents who you are and why you matter. When looking to revamp your website, hire experts. Make sure your navigation clearly reflects your brand strategy and make sure your value proposition is clear and understandable to website visitors. There are many decisions to be made when redesigning a website, so use your newly refreshed brand strategy to guide these decisions. A strategically led redesign is key to having a well-designed user experience.

A Brand Refresh = More Meaningful, Competitive, Successful Business

Taking the time to invest in your brand will bring tangible positive results to your bottom line.

In order to hold greater meaning in the hearts and minds of the people who are most important to your business, strongly position your brand and focus on meaningfully articulating your value.

By getting everyone around the table internally, with sales and marketing brought together, your sales cycle quickens, your business becomes better positioned for success, your recruitment efforts prove more successful, and your brand helps fuel a competitive and thriving business.

Refresh your brand and bring its purpose to life for both inward- and outward-facing audiences in order to stay ahead and continue to grow. Your business depends on it.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

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.

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Tag: Positioning

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