Putting Your Company in a Box
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how humans categorize things. We are all here today because our distant ancestors evolved incredible abilities to quickly match patterns and sort the world into boxes. This pattern-recognition capability explains so much about how we experience and navigate the world - from pareidolia to social prejudice.
Categories are a primary heuristic we use (sometimes consciously, but often subconsciously) to quickly make decisions. This matters enormously for business leaders - especially in how we talk to the world about our companies and what they do, where they fit, and the value they provide.
The Two Paths
For an emerging company, there are really two primary paths for category positioning:
Path 1: The Challenger enters an already-established category; they challenge the incumbents in a space that already exists. Think “CRM software” or “project management tools” or “content delivery network”.
Strengths:
You don’t have to educate the market about what you do. The box already exists and people understand it. You can save your energy for explaining how you’re different from others in the same box.
You’ll inherit all the positive associations of the category. For example, if people already understand why the category matters to them, and how it fits with their business, you benefit from that baseline understanding and you don’t have to build it yourself.
Weaknesses:
You’re judged by existing standards. The incumbents set the rules, defined the features that matter, and established the pricing models.
Transference works both ways - you’ll inherit the negative associations of the category, too. If the category has baggage - if people think “CRM software is complicated and expensive” - you’ll need to fight that perception from day one.
Path 2: The Creator creates a new category. This approach is about defining a space that doesn’t yet exist. This is often tempting to founding teams who can confidently say “nothing like this has been done before”.
Strengths:
You’re in the driver’s seat. You get to establish what matters, set the standards, and define the language. If you’re very lucky and execute well, you become the incumbent in an exciting new space. If you’re insanely lucky and have a great communications strategy, people could even start using your language to describe the category. You might even become the default choice in the category.
You avoid negative baggage. There are no preconceived notions about a category weighing you down.
Weaknesses:
It’s extraordinarily resource-intensive. You need to educate, define, and evangelize. That takes massive investments in content, events, sales enablement, and media & analyst relations.
You get none of the positive transference. You don’t inherit anything - which sounds good, but it also means you’re starting from a place of zero understanding.
Choose Your Path, Then Translate
You do need to choose your category approach - Challenger or Creator. That’s a real strategic decision with real implications for resources, competition, and market dynamics. But once you’ve made that choice, recognize that your audiences do not all have the same boxes in their heads. Strong communications means translating your positioning into the language and mental models of each audience - even when that means you’re communicating like a Creator to one audience while communicating as a Challenger to another.
Sometimes, the Box Depends on Who’s Looking
Here’s what I’ve learned over the years: your category positioning might be fixed, but your communications strategy should flex based on who’s listening. In linguistics this is called “register” - we all talk to Mom or Dad differently than we do our dry cleaner or barista - but sometimes in communications the desire for consistency steps on the need to tailor messages for each audience.
I’ve seen this play out repeatedly across different companies and stages, but one clear example was at EdgeCast Networks. We were clearly a “Challenger” company. We entered an established category - content delivery networks (CDNs). By that point in web history, many (if not most) of the technical audience understood that box fairly well. We could talk to those people about edge servers, caching, bandwidth, latency. The box existed in their mind.
But here’s the thing: that box only existed in certain people’s minds, and they were often not the final decisionmakers.
Our technical audience - engineers, infrastructure teams - already knew what a CDN was. For them, we could use Challenger communications: here’s what a CDN does, here’s why we’re better, here’s how we’re different.
But the vast majority of our C-level audience - the business leaders who controlled budgets - had no idea what a CDN was. And frankly, they didn’t care about edge servers or caching algorithms. For them, we needed to communicate as a “Creator” to create a new category in their minds. Technical evangelism wouldn’t work here.
That’s where our customer program came in. We didn’t talk about what we did - we talked about what we made possible in terms of things and brands they already knew and used, for instance: “We don’t make Tumblr. We make Tumblr faster.”
We were creating a box in the C-level mind: “infrastructure services that make products I already use better.” That made it much easier for them to see our offering in the context of their own business needs.
Same company. Same category positioning. Different communications strategies.
Being Multilingual
Strong communications work requires being multilingual. You need to execute different communications strategies simultaneously without losing coherence. When you’ve chosen the Challenger path but are speaking to audiences who don’t have that category box in their heads yet, you need to communicate like a Creator. Your technical audience and your business audience might be on the same buying committee. They’ll be in some of the same meetings. They’ll be talking to one other about you. So your message needs to be harmonious and work in both frames.
This is why communications can’t be an afterthought. It’s not about wordsmithing or making things pretty. It’s strategic work that requires understanding:
What category are you actually in?
Who are your key decision-maker personas?
What boxes already exist in each persona’s mind?
How do you need to communicate differently to each without fracturing your brand?
You’re not just building a brand; that’s an internally-facing view. The externally-facing view is that you’re building the mental infrastructure for people to understand you in ways that make sense to them.
It’s natural for us all to put things into boxes - that’s something you can never change. What you can change is which box you’re in and how you talk about it.
[Header photo: Eric Karim Cornelis via Unsplash. Thank you, Eric!]
