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.

Brands and Competitive Frame of Reference

When executives are positioning their brands they should not forget about determining their brands' competitive frames of reference, or put another way, the product or service categories in which their brands are operating. 

I have already shared the example of Strong National Museum of Play. By choosing the category of "museums of play" (of which it is the only one) instead of "children's museums," not only does it stand out as a category of one brand but it also allows it to offer a variety of play experiences for adults, giving the museum a broader appeal and audience. 

Another example is Artisan Works. Artisan Works crams 500,000 art objects in 50,000 square feet of space, however it does not consider itself an art museum or art gallery. Rather, it is an event space. It hosts more than 300 events per year and has a rent-to-own art program. 

I am working with one brand that is trying to decide whether it is a gas station, convenience store, gas/station convenience store combination or something entirely new (we have tested many out-of-the-box new store concepts for them).

Urgent Care emerged as a new category that is separate from hospitals, doctor's offices or outpatient clinics. 

I worked with one industry trade association that broke out of its mold as a membership organization to become more of an industry think tank, expert center and consultancy.

What was Cirque du Soliel when it was first created? A circus? A theatrical production? Or something entirely new? What are Fringe Festivals? What is their category? What makes them different from other types of events or festivals?

Is this brand of food a snack food, a healthy food, a food for children, or a meal component? How it is defined makes a difference. The same goes for restaurants. What type of restaurant is your brand trying to be? To whom does it cater for what type of occasion (or non-occasion)?

Not that we have to put brands into small boxes, but thinking through a brand's competitive frame of reference will have an impact on its target customers, competitive set, type of usage and frequency of usage.

When one considers competitive frames of reference carefully, often it even has an impact on business models and potential revenue streams.

Don't neglect considering your brand's frame of reference.

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.

Innovation & Brand Growth

Much of brand sales growth has resulted from sub-category innovation and innovation that redefines categories. Within alcohol products, consider Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey and all of the other flavored and infused whiskeys, vodkas and other types of alcohol. Consider the explosion of craft beers of every style, variety and flavor. Consider the rise of flavor packets or infusers for water. Consider what smart phone technology has done for the mobile phone category. Consider the series of innovations in television including color television, digital television, cable television, satellite television and smart television.  Consider the product innovations in the Swiffer line of products. The Strong museum elevated itself by becoming the first museum of play (instead of the more traditional children's museum). Consider what the Toyota Prius did to the automobile category or Tesla did to the category. Consider what Google cars will do to the category. What has online learning done for Southern New Hampshire University? Consider what WeatherTech has done to protect vehicle floors from salt damage during the winter. Consider what digital camera technology has done for photography. How about what LED lighting has done for energy conservation and light bulb longevity? Consider what USB flash drives did for computer memory, transferring files and computer backup. Consider what the introduction of ATMs did for banking. I think you get the picture.

A sure way to insure growth for your brand is to continue to innovate within and outside of its product categories. Each useful innovation creates sales surges and produces competitive advantage (at least for a time). If your brand does not innovate, it will experience slower growth and eventually be left behind.

I wish you great success in creating product and category innovations for your brand.