Fundamentally, every major market category is an aggregation of subcategories. A major category is that encompassing niche in the market where your brand competes. A subcategory, however, is more streamlined with your competitors’ product lines more directly related to yours.
Focusing on attaining a significant share of the broader market category is most times untenable if you are not among the first 5 players in that market. For these relatively smaller players, it pays more to focus on dominating a subcategory.
To demonstrate this, the global betting space is a major market category. 1xbet – with its mobile 1xBet app – is one of the biggest players in this category, with estimated revenue of $8m.
But within this category is a subcategory called online casino betting dominated by the likes of Vulkan Vegas Casino, Royal Panda, and LeoVegas.
So here, is the trick. Instead of focusing your resources on capturing a sizable share of the general category (which could be exceedingly competitive), you could instead identify a key subcategory.
This niche is well smaller than the major category, perfectly aligning with your customer needs and your strengths as a brand. Certainly, it helps if this niche has significant growth prospects too!
Now, you would channel your efforts to build an authoritative reputation as a leader in that subcategory. This is the equivalent of owning that specialized niche.
This way, you successfully bypass the exhausting competitiveness of a major category, yet derive sizable success from commanding your dedicated space. If this small niche blossoms across time, your company will equally enjoy exponential growth.
How to measure your category ownership
The big question now is how you would measure your extent of economic dominion in your niche. What metrics accurately gauge your ownership share of your specialized category?
Here are two effective ways to calculate that: your share of the total sales in that category (as typified in your category percentage sale) and your percentage of customer usage rate.
Undoubtedly, these metrics are only accurate at the start, but with the increasing sophistication of your brand, the aforementioned metrics lose their accuracy. Given this, you need a more holistic system of measurement to tell your market share in your specific niche.
Category development index (CDI) and category ownership strength are two valuable metrics that can help you measure your performance level in a market segment. Category ownership strength, on its own, combines three key variables. These are your risk level, competitor performance, and market relevance.
To examine these variables accurately, you need to look beyond your sales, paying more attention to your customer relationships and product innovation. The category strength ownership is a fantastic metric to deploy in measuring your performance if you are already positioned as a category owner.
On the other hand, the Category Development Index (CDI) gives you a refined analysis of your sales performance for a specific cluster, while comparing it against the mean performance among customers in that segment.
The CDI is aimed at picking out the weak and strong segments. This gives you a more streamlined understanding of specific customer segments in relation to the encompassing market.
Having established the concept of category ownership, you should be understandably curious about how you can dominate your unique space.
You may not necessarily need an outlandish budget to achieve this. Sometimes, just repositioning your brand can spectacularly install and consolidate you as a leader in your specific category.
How then do you maximize such brand positioning?
Positioning your brand to become a category owner
Brand positioning involves reorienting your customer’s perspective of your brand. This involves remodeling the idea your audience has about you, making your brand more attractive in their minds, as well as enhancing your credibility and peculiarity.
Brand positioning exceeds just slapping a fanciful tagline or logo on your brand. Brand positioning involves embellishing your unique selling points to better distinguish yourself from your competitors in the eyes of your customers.
The powerful relationship between brand positioning and storytelling
Brands today are leveraging the enormous potency of personalized marketing. More than those generic marketing, many brands now enjoy exponentially amplified results by flavoring their marketing with storytelling.
Customers are quick to connect with brands whose stories resonate with their prevailing reality. Storytelling enables your customers to sentimentally connect with your brand, establishing an emotionally-juiced customer-brand relationship.
To demonstrate this, a low-budget shopper is most likely to connect with a brand whose CEO’s story details his early struggles as a low-income fashion enthusiast.
Warby Parker Eyewear is smashing it by positioning its brand as a “poor man’s messiah” in a rather aristocratic eyewear industry stacked with high-end glasses.
Warby Parker Eyewear promotes its story as being driven to provide affordable designer eyewear due to the regrettable personal experience of a teammate. This said experience details a member of their team losing his expensive glasses on a backpacking trip and being forced to painfully squint through his first semester of grad school. Why? Because the glasses were too expensive for him to replace.
So here we have Warby Parker posing as an affordable destination for all lovers of designer eyewear whose pockets may not be deep enough to afford the traditionally pricey ones.
This storytelling has worked miraculously for Warby Parker, allowing them to establish a robust foothold in the low-end designer eyewear niche.
In all, while putting forward an absorbing brand story, you should also strive to enhance your brand positioning by creating unique value.
Steps to effectively distinguish your brand position in your marketplace
Here are steps to help you better illuminate your brand position in your category:
Analyze your brand and your competition
Here is one big question I would posit for your brand: how outstanding is your marketing? Are you marketing a unique brand or just another regular product that is already strewn across the market?
You must analyze your brand positioning at the moment. This should inform you accurately on the next steps – if there are some tweaks to execute in your branding or if a complete overhaul is needed.
It would help if you had an accurate analysis of your current brand positioning concerning your competition. You should be asking if your prospective customer persona agrees with your market objectives, values, and unique strengths as a brand. Indeed, your brand voice must resonate with your value proposition and brand persona.
After you have performed your introspective due diligence, you would have to elaborately analyze your competitors. This analysis is aimed at identifying the competitive edge you should pursue to displace your rivals.
Here are various ways to examine your competition:
Start by carrying out a penetrative market research
Conducting market research could be a tremendous way to identify your competitors’ positioning in your niche market. You could use a strategic market keyword and note the top companies that emerge in the result of your query.
Integrate customer feedback
Customer feedback helps you see your brand from the eyes of your customers. You can ask them about the products rivaling yours or the services they prefer over yours. Also, ask them the reason for this preference.
Integrate digital platforms
Forums and online platforms like Yelp allow you to access a wealth of critical data on what consumers are saying about you and your customers. Also, on a platform like Quora, you can see the questions your customers are rampantly asking.
After all these, it is time to carry out revealing competitor research.
An in-depth analysis of your rivals would help you ascertain their branding and see which strategies are working for the successful ones.
Here is a checklist of what you should essentially accrue from your competitor analysis:
- Your competitors’ product line or services they are offering
- Their respective strengths and weaknesses in relation to yours
- Determining their current brand positioning
- The brand positioning strategies successfully working for your competitors
Next, aggrandize your unique value proposition
To efficiently position your brand, you have to put your peculiar selling points in the spotlight. What makes you different from the crowd of competitors littering your space?
If you have diligently conducted your competitor survey, you should have been adequately furnished with insights into your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. It is very likely that you would see patterns in the winning guys and shared characteristics in the losing guys.
Some of their weaknesses might be your selling point for the top-performing brands in your niche. Here is your competitive edge over your rivals that you need to make noise about. Make sure to amplify where you are confident you outperform the lot and stick that in the face of your customers.
Creating a brand positioning statement
After discovering your competitive edge, you would need to craft a compelling brand positioning statement around that. This doesn’t need to be elaborate; one or two sentences could suffice so long you succinctly convey the unique value (relative to your rivals) you are bringing to the table for consumers.
Take, for example, Amazon’s positioning statement:
“Our vision is to be the earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”
In this brand statement, you see Amazon defining the boundaries of its market, placating its audience with a unique brand promise, and lacing it all up with credibility.
There you are! This is a definitive guide on category ownership and how to domineer your market by positioning your brand strategically. We are confident that you have learned sufficiently to equip your brand with the right identity and market posture to command your space.
Sources
https://buildd.co/marketing/category-development-index
https://visionedgemarketing.com/category-ownership-strength-as-a-marketing-performance-metric
