As I mentioned in my previous post on branding, the main goal of any branding program is to differenciate your brand from all others and favourably influence the consumer in her / his purchasing behaviour.
The best way to ensure your brand is differentiated to the maximum is to have no competition and the best way to do that is by creating a new category. If you do not create a new category you
the consumer’s mind as LEADER, FIRST, THE ORIGINAL, PIONEERS; you will simply struggle against the competition to try and find space in an overly packed existing category.
When you think about Cola, prestigous cars and tablets what brands come to mind?
Coke created the category of COLA, it didn’t accept the category of “soft drinks” it created a new category and it dominated it. Mercedes created the category of the prestigious car, and iPad created the Tablet. When it comes to their respective categories these brands are the LEADERS and being leader implies you are the best; nothing succeeds like success. It is proven that people subconsciously associate (the greater majority) the leader with the best. One of the biggest and recent examples is the Tablet, who do you think of when you think of the Tablet? iPad right, you associate the brand as the leader in that category, why? The brand created the category and was first, leader….the best, at least in the mind.
Be LEADER from the very start
So how did these brands dominate their category? They created it! Sounds simple and the basics of branding are that simple, the challenge is defining the category in respects to your target audience and their needs / market problems. That is where the hard work comes in, in addition you have to work to get the message out there and make sure it sticks, that when people that about your category they think of your product, Tablet = …?
Ultimately you want your brand to be known for something, you have to define what that is and create a category for it where it is LEADER straight away.
Brands are born through PR; let the media do the work
The way to give birth to a brand is through Public Relations, that’s when others (the media; social or traditional) talk about your brand. How do you manage to get interest in your modest brand? Different question, same answer; create a new category. The media like to talk about things that are news worthy and they want to be the first in telling the story, they are interested in the category and your brand gets attention for being the pioneer in the new category, they are not so interested in an additional brand in an existing category.
This has a two main benefits, first; people don’t want to listen to you talking about your brand (everybody talks favorably about their own brands) they want to hear others talking about your brand. This creates more credibility. Secondly, you could not generate the same momentum as the media can. So remember, create the category and let the media bring it to the market. Great examples of this have been Starbucks and the body-shop, their advertising budgets where tiny when they started out, they created a new category and let the media talk about it, well, they helped the media be first in telling the story:-)
What about you?
So think about whatever project, product, brand you are working on, it could even be your own personal brand, and think what category would it belong to? What could you do to your brand to enable you to create a new category?
