Category Camo: how brands fuck themselves by fitting in
Why blend in with the crowd when you could be the brand they follow? Matt McCain, co-founder of Seattle-based independent creative agency Little Hands of Stone, explains.
/ Credit: Liquid Death
No brand sets out to blend in. There’s no Effie category for 'Doing Pretty Much What Everyone Else Is Doing.' Because blending in is not only profoundly un-fun, it’s wildly ineffective. Yet brands keep on doing it. Why? And how do we make it stop? Thanks for asking.
Everything is Nothing
The most avoidable screw-up, and the biggest reason brands get ignored, is trying to be all things to all people. The whole ‘Homo Sapiens 12-64’ show.
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Good strategy is painful sacrifice. Without the willingness to kill some cohorts and concentrate on the few you can truly get to know and speak directly to, your brand will live in Homogenyville and remain relevant-ish to everyone-ish and no one-ish.
We’re all Sheep
Brands are like humans because they’re run by humans. So brands act like humans. And most humans follow trends because that’s how we’re wired. Or as ChatGPT told me, “By aligning with popular ideas or adopting trendy behaviors, people gain a feeling of acceptance and avoid potential social exclusion.” And the fact that I asked ChatGPT to weigh in proves I’m just another sheep having AI ghostwrite my shit.
So brands want to fit in. But this “fitting in” is exactly what gets us “totally ignored” by the people we’re trying to “sell things to.”
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Just fight human evolution. It’s easy.
But... it Works?
Sticking to category norms isn’t just about acceptance. It’s about the fear of breaking from what we know works. A pizza place can’t be the first to walk away from an erotic cheese-pull. A ski area that doesn’t show chin-deep powder? Death. Raising money to fight cancer without leaning into cancer-survival stories? Yeah right.
Because here’s the thing: category conventions are rarely wrong. In a vacuum, cliches do a fantastic job of signaling the things that we need to communicate. Melty cheesiness. Deep snow. Hope in the face of long odds. What’s dead wrong, however, is thinking that your brand can win while existing within the guardrails of these conventions, surrounded by every other fear-bound brand. What works doesn’t work?
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Please stop it.
More of a data wonk? Distinctive creative performs +62%* better than work that blends in.* There.
Get Naked
When brands stick to convention, they’re essentially sporting head-to-toe category camouflage. It’s not a good look. Start by laying bare the tropes that exist in your category. How are brands showing up? What are they saying? The strategies. The hot trends are barreling towards cliché-hood. Then make a blood oath among your team: NEVER WILL WE EVER. Keep each other honest. Call each other out for sneaking back towards the “all things to all people” wasteland you’ve left behind.
Next, focus on what you need to say to your newly narrowed audience. And sprint in the opposite direction of how your competitors would express those things. Go off-grid. Get freaky. Get comfortable being afraid. Embrace the unproven. This is your new home.
Examples in the Wild
No one is doing this better and more consistently than Liquid Death. It is the undefeated god of doing precisely what no other water brand in its right mind would do. Yet it is extremely strategic. It hammers sustainability. It screams good flavor. And It doesn’t pretend to be for everyone (understatement). Result: it is kicking all asses in the water and soda and even booze categories.
Dove’s ‘The Cost of Beauty’ work is their latest, most brutally effective example of turning the category on its perfectly imperfect ear by rejecting the prevailing, Instagram-filtered definition of beauty. Year-over-year sales keep climbing.
And Garth Brooks (yes, he’s a brand) went hard against his category by making the somehow radical announcement that his Nashville bar will continue to serve Bud Light. He went as far as saying that folks who get bent out of shape about his decision are “assholes” and can get their low-cal beer elsewhere. This keeps with Garth’s long-held views on inclusion and not shooting woke cans with assault rifles. Time will tell how this stance affects his booze sales, but it’s clear that Garth’s principles (and long-term brand) are more important.
Or Don’t
There are absolutely ways to succeed and grow while existing within category norms. They usually involve outspending one’s competition 100-to-1. If you’ve got that tool in your toolbox, good on you and feel free to ignore everything I and ChatGPT have to say on the subject. Or you can save millions of dollars and do work people will remember. Your call.
*Source: WARC The Anatomy of Effectiveness 2022, Ebiquity Study