Ten Ways to Successfully Position Your Brand in Overcrowded Markets

Today, brand managers are increasingly at a loss about how to differentiate their brands. In most product and service categories, every unique and purchase motivating position has been claimed by one or more brands. Product and service categories have matured, brand research has gotten sophisticated and competitors have successfully filled all of the brand positioning niches. So what is a brand manager to do to discover a new unique and compelling brand position?

Here are some ideas:

1. Identify, create and own a new "category of one." The Strong National Museum of Play did this by repositioning its brand from a children's museum to the only museum of play. 
2. Through qualitative research, discover one or more compromises all of the brands in the category are making with their consumers and then design a business model and brand to overcome these compromises. CarMax did this vis-a-vis traditional used car dealerships and Uber did this vis-a-vis traditional taxicab companies. 
3. Choose a valued benefit that has never been a part of the category. Apple did this with the introduction of smartphone apps. Southwest Airlines did this by owning "fun."
4. Add an element to the brand that no other competitor in the category has added. Opaque did this. It introduced the concept of dining in the dark. 
5. Make an outrageous version of a traditional product. Check out Loudmouth Golf for wild clothes. 
6. Combine two or more products into one or two or more functions into one product. Victorinox Swiss Army was one of the first to do this with its knives. 
7. Focus on a niche market or on one market segment. Orvis and lululemon do this, as does Lane Bryant. 
8. Create a character that gives the brand a distinctive personality. Kellogg's Tony the Tiger was one of the first, but GEICO's gecko,  Progressive Insurance's Flo and Jamie and Pistachio's elephant, Ernie are also examples of this. 
9. Go left when everyone else is going right. Naomi Klein did this with her No Logo book when everyone else was writing about the power of brands.
10. Use a new material or technology that no one else is using. SmartSolve has created environmentally friendly dissolving paper, pouches, labels, thread, tape and adhesive. 

What do all of these approaches have in common? Out-of-the-box thinking.  None of these brands would have become what they became if their managers had applied linear or incremental thinking. 

If you are interested in this topic, here are some other blog posts that might be of interest to you:

• Branding in Highly Competitive Categories
• Differentiating on the Unexpected
• 50 Ways to Differentiate Your Brand
• 6 Powerful Ways to Differentiate Your Brand
• Sources of Brand Differentiation
• Creating "Category of One" Brands
• Creating "Category of One" Brands
• Breaking Customer Compromises
• Branding Water
• Just for Fun - The Loudmouth Brand

By the way, the Interceptor vehicle pictured above is a car, boat, plane and helicopter all in one, applying idea #6 above.

Marketing to Satiated Consumers

I have a birthday coming up. My wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I said,"nothing" and I meant it. Why? I just bought a new Tesla for myself and we are in the middle of a master bathroom remodel. We have spent enough money for the year as far as I am concerned. Plus, there is absolutely nothing I need. I am at an age at which most people are focused on downsizing and simplification (though we are not quite there yet). However, there is truly nothing I want or need that I don't already have. 

I am aware of how blessed I am. Many people are in a different place. They still have many unmet wants and needs. Certainly, if you have a smaller income or fewer assets or many more mouths to feed and certainly if you are in an earlier life stage in which you are still forming or growing your household, you still may need many physical things. Or, on the other end of the continuum, if you are unable to stop comparing yourself to people who have more than you do, you might want that second home, a more expensive car or a bigger boat. Heaven knows, some billionaires are trading in their 200+ foot yachts for 300+ foot yachts. And they are buying an increasing number of yacht toys - water slides, tenders, helicopters, personal submersibles (submarines),  etc. - for their super yachts.

But for most of the rest of us, at some point in our lives we move from wanting more "things" to spending more of our money (and often more of our time) on services and experiences.  Services can make your life easier, give you more time, remove unwanted tasks, make your life more comfortable and even indulge your senses. Services include lawn care, spa services, baby sitting, pet sitting, pest control, house cleaning, pool cleaning, personal trainers, etc. Experiences include fine dining, travel, concerts, theater, dance performances, comedy improv, wine tastings, massage, flotation therapy, spectator sports, water parks, theme parks, haunted houses, adventure sports, hobbies, etc.

One way for product brands to deal with satiated consumers is to bundle services or experiences with their products. Another is to offer product novelty or more sophisticated products with better aesthetics or otherwise enhanced sensory experiences. Some hotel brands have significantly improved their customer services. Others have added rooftop lounges, swimming pools, hot tubs and bars. Yet others have added unique soothing aromatherapy scents to their hotels. Some products include extended service support. Yet others deliver their products in unique experiential ways. Build-A-Bear is an example of this. While novelty and gimmicks can have a limited life, many restaurants have created unique dining experiences to lure more customers. Consider Opaque, the restaurant in which you dine in the dark or the Ice Restaurant in Dubai or the underwater restaurant at the Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa in the Maldives.  

So, if you have maxed out with your brand's product sales, consider enhancing your brand's offering with services, experiences, enhanced aesthetics or additional sensory elements. 

Sources of Brand Differentiation

Brands benefit from a wide variety of sources of differentiation. While many components can contribute to the differentiation, often there are only one or two dominant ones. For instance, Absolut vodka benefits from its unique bottle shape and the promotion of that unique shape. GEICO insurance benefits from its huge advertising budget and it unique and quirky advertising including its charming gecko character.  On the other hand, Amazon.com benefits from from being one of the first brands to adopt the online retail model, including its very powerful search and browse technologies. Also, the fact that it plows all of its profits back into business improvement. Uber benefits from a breakthrough business model and the technology that supports it, which drives costs down substantially while improving the customer experience. Robert Graham clothing benefits from its bold product designs, coupled with its highly unusual product features (i.e., custom designed Swarovski crystal buttons) and its interesting tagline - Knowledge, Wisdom, Truth. Tesla Motors automobiles benefit from a visionary product concept (all-electric luxury car), supported by leading-edge high quality luxury features and a relentless pursuit of excellence. Opaque restaurants benefit from a unique restaurant concept - dining in the dark.

While all of the benefits listed above might be classified as some combination of functional, emotional, experiential or self-expressive customer benefits, those benefits derive from different sources. In some instances, it is the result of product design, marketing strategy or advertising genius. In others, it is the result of radical new business models or organizational cultures driven toward excellence.

The point of this is that sometimes marketers create the primary source of differentiation, while in many instances it is something that is typically outside of the marketer's control - visionary leadership, business model design, product design, organizational design, the organization's culture, etc. - that leads to the brand's differentiation.

Think about what differentiates your brand. Visionary leadership, disruptive technologies, radical new business models and cultures of unrelenting excellence often can have a much greater impact than what a marketer can control. What do most all of these have in common? They are are based on a design and innovation mentality, whether it applies to business model design, organization design, product design, product packaging design or marketing strategy/tactic/campaign design, there is some level of design and innovation in each of these examples.

Creating "Category of One" Brands

To become a “category of one” brand is the holy grail of branding. What does it mean to become a “category of one” brand? It means that no other brand is even in the same category as your brand. Your brand has created a new category – one that matters to people.

What does it take to create a “category of one” brand? Intuition, insight, vision, risk-taking and an entrepreneurial spirit.

Here are some examples of “category of one” brands:

• The Strong (National Museum of Play)
• Cirque du Soleil (A New Form of Live Entertainment)
• CarMax (A New Approach to Used Car Sales)
• Uber (A New Approach to Paid Transportation)
• Netflix (A New Approach to Movie and TV Watching)
• Naropa University (Focused on Spiritual Enlightenment/Transformation)
• Opaque (Dining in the Dark)
• Modern Toilet Restaurant (Toilet Themed Restaurant)
• Elio Motors (Two Seat, Three Wheel, 84 MPG Vehicle for $6,800)
• Medifast (Energy Drops and Flavor Infusers)

Central to creating a “category of one’ brand is envisioning and innovating the new category. This will certainly create buzz and a huge amount of free publicity. It will also create new demand. The people to whom it is targeted will want to try the new brand. And then they will want to spread the word about what they experienced. Word-of-mouth marketing is significant for “category of one” brands.

Creating a new category also creates a first mover advantage, and depending on how fast one can scale up, significant economies of scale and network effects. This creates tremendous financial advantages for the “category of one” brand and barriers to entry for me-too brands and other subsequent competitors.

Eventually, other brands will enter the category, especially if it is large, profitable and growing. However, if your brand is the one that created the category and it scaled up fast and took advantage of the category creation buzz, it should have financial advantages and mindshare advantages.

Are there currently or will there soon be competitors to each of the above listed brands? Sure, but there will likely never be another Cirque de Soleil.

Being a “category of one” implies a fair amount of innovative thinking, product innovation, often system innovation and usually business model innovation. So “category of one” brands can even be quite disruptive. Consider Amazon.com when it was first introduced or eBay when it was first introduced or Uber today.

Brands that innovated new categories must take charge of and credit for those new categories and they must grow them quickly or they might lose their advantage. Kodak created digital photography but consider its position in that market today. Who created the smartphone category? Who owns it today? Who created the MP3 player category? Who owns it today? Is it even relevant anymore with the emergence of the smartphone category? Which brand created airport rental beds? Is that brand still dominant in the category?

Instead of trying to differentiate your brand within an already crowded product or service category, consider creating a “category of one” instead. It is more fun. It will create more buzz. You will get a lot more free publicity. And, if you do it right, your brand will grow at an amazing rate. To read my post on seven strategies to  create new business categories, click here.

We offer a full day workshop in which clients explore alternative category definitions, competitive frames of reference and preemptive brand positions to discover a potential “category of one” brand position. This highly facilitated workshop is preceded by stakeholder research. Its output is a recommended “category of one” brand position, which can be translated into a tagline, a marketing campaign and inform strategic business decisions.

Please email us about how this workshop can benefit your brand.