Why Going Against Category Norms Can Be The Surest Form Of Innovation

Being Radical, Australian Lamb, and The Anvils Awards

Author

Pedro Porto Alegre
January 17, 2024

In this edition:

Column: Why Going Against Category Norms Can Be The Surest Form Of Innovation

From time to time a random small brand will kick the door down of a product category — not because of its superior product — but because of its communications.

Innovation is a hard business to be in. Companies sink millions of dollars each year trying to innovate the category with new potato chip flavours, new tech gadgets, new apparel materials, and just about through any possible angle within their existing domain.

Striking gold is rare. Having witnessed the resources that go into innovation commercialization first hand while working at PepsiCo, I can attest that very few — and I mean, veeeery few — can shake up their category with meaningful innovations.

However, there’s one type of innovation that often goes unnoticed by product and brand managers. And that is comms innovation.

Communications is an element of marketing. The two terms sometimes are used interchangeably, but there’s a subtle difference between the two. Marketing is the broader field — it deals with pricing, promotion, product, and placement —, but similarly to advertising, comms is just a sliver of the marketing function.

Integrated communications planning, as it is formally known within marketing departments, aims to unify all forms of messaging internally and externally by finding synergies between initiatives, driving consistency, aligning media channels, and effectively bringing it all together by tying up all loose ends.

When done effectively, audiences engage with brands in an unforced manner, oftentimes being delighted and surprised in native ways — such as when Heinz partnered with Waze to turn the car icon into a ketchup bottle if the driver’s speed slowed down to “ketchup pouring speed” (0.028 miles per hour…), unlocking coupons and other benefits for the customer.

While the above was part of an integrated comms plan for a campaign, these types of creative initiatives can be quite expensive and difficult to craft (unless, of course, you hire a kick-ass ad agency to help ya).

So in this context, being new to a category can be an advantage. By showing up in novel ways, new brands actually have the upper hand due to not carrying past baggage.

Murder Your Thirst

One of today’s most popular and beloved brands is also one that is fairly new to a boring category.

Liquid Death entered the water category with a complete out-of-category mentality. By positioning themselves as how most energy drinks do — and going even further — they managed to build a brand that’s recognizable, has an authentic tone of voice, and unlimited creative runway.

Instead of selling bottled water, they chose tallboy cans. Instead talking about how purified their water was, their motto became “murder your thirst”. Instead of choosing soft colours to signal levity, they picked bold hardcore palettes. Instead of designing a logo that was smooth and clear, they leaned into a medieval-pub-dark ages-looking typeface with a melting skull.

Everything about this brand goes against what the water category had been doing up to that point. And while their positioning won’t ever resonate with some people, the water-drinking humans of this world simply cannot ignore Liquid Death.

This is a territory that brand managers dream of getting to. And the way Liquid Death did it was quite simple — by not pigeon-holing themselves to the category norms, they were able to easily stand out in a boring and overcrowded competitive landscape.

B2B (Or Bold-To-Bolder)

Bringing out-of-category positioning into the development of a brand isn’t a luxury reserved only for the B2C marketers. There are some B2B companies that have defied category norms and achieved great success without having to invent something completely new to acquire new customers.

Take MailChimp, for example.

Here’s a marketing and automation platform that serves small and medium sized businesses but that has effectively carved such a distinct position in people’s minds that they oftentimes are the first choice, despite not always being the best choice.

Freddie, its iconic mascot, is a hat wearing, side-winking chimp that has defied the norms of SaaS branding. While most brands were leaning into tech-y, pretentious, and overpromising messaging, MailChimp decided to not emulate their competitors — but their kick-ass customers.

You see, when you’re THAT customer-centric that your brand becomes one that your very clients hope to build for their own organizations, you’ve won the category.

But they didn’t stop there.

Instead of running ad campaigns that talked about how good they were, highlighting all their functionalities and such (don’t get me wrong, they also did that), they focused on burning their name into people’s brains.

The following video does a much better job at explaining than I ever could:

When In Doubt, Be Radical

I’m a huge believer that great advertising takes shape when its orchestrators have a few brain cells that lean towards the radical.

As the great Jeff Goodby said in his Masterclass about advertising:

“And we loved the feeling of going out, and seeing it there the next day. Like, you know, look at that. We smashed the crap out of that pumpkin all over the guy's front porch, you know? It was, like, awesome to see it the next day. And I thought, that's kind of what advertising is, you know? You should be that excited about doing it. It should feel kind of naughty and, like, it's the middle of the night, and you're doing this thing, and it's going to be unleashed on the world tomorrow. And you should look forward to that moment when it's unleashed, you know? So in that sense, advertising is like vandalism. It's, like, loud, in your face, and it's still there the next day. That's why it's like vandalism.”

And while not every brand has the right to lean into their rowdy side (although all humans have it within them, but they’re taught to suppress it as they grow older), they can and should lean into their bold brand truth. And if they happen not to have a kick-ass brand truth, then at least go counter to the category norms.

This type of comms innovation is seldom used, but those who do have a place in our hearts and minds, because we can all relate to not fitting in or simply to letting our wild side show from time to time.

That attitude shakes trees. And you can only get the high-hanging fruit by shaking them a little harder than the others.

Inspiration: Australian Lamb’s “Generation Gap”

I've seen a lot of insane ads but this has got to be up there among the craziest.

Despite being a 3-minute long commercial, this has been buzzing the internet over the past week — proving that when you let the creative breathe, VTRs will come hand over fist.

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The Ad Rodeo Association is the celebration of creative excellence in the Prairie provinces. Each year, Ad Rodeo provides creative professionals the opportunity to meet, talk, learn, mentor and celebrate what they do through several events that culminate in the Anvil Awards. The Anvil Awards represents the special talent and effort it takes to be recognized by your peers for creating the very best.

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