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brand category


Brand Positioning: Why Now?

Brand Positioning: Why Now?

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 Maybe, customers even perceive your brand as outdated or irrelevant.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...
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How to Launch a New Brand Category

How to Launch a New Brand Category

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,...
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The Pros and Cons of Launching a New Category

The Pros and Cons of Launching a New Category

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...
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Category Creators: Creating a New Brand Category to Drive Growth

Category Creators: Creating a New Brand Category to Drive Growth

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...
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Naming a New Brand Category is Harder Than it Looks

Naming a New Brand Category is Harder Than it Looks

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....
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