Category Strategy vs. Brand Strategy vs. Positioning

Let's clear this up once and for all.

Have you ever heard this?

“Category strategy, brand strategy, and positioning are all just variations of the same thing.”

That sounds nice. And it’s very diplomatic.

But it’s not true.

Marketing leaders must understand that there are important differences between these approaches. Conflating them will put you at risk of applying the wrong discipline at the wrong time. Picking the wrong approach can waste your efforts, force your company to spin its wheels, and even put your career at risk.

So let’s clear up these differences once and for all, so you know what strategy to pursue, and when.

Start With These One-Line Definitions

Here’s the quickest way to define each:

• Category Strategy: A business discipline for creating a dominant, profitable, and defensible position in the market.

• Brand Strategy: A process for creating emotional resonance with buyers, through things like visual identity, taglines, values, and beliefs.

• Positioning: A methodology for creating contrasts between your product or solution and its alternatives and substitutes.

Let’s unpack these further.

Category Strategy: A Holistic Approach to Winning Unclaimed Territory

Category strategy is the most foundational of these approaches. A good category strategy guides the business in thinking about how it will claim new territory that it can own and dominate.

It’s an approach that helps brands create an unfair advantage and gain outsized returns. Your category strategy can lead you down the path of creating a brand new, greenfield category, but that’s not the only play available. There are five more. If you haven’t explored The 6 Category Strategies, check them out now. Category strategists build from first principles to evaluate everything from category dynamics, product roadmap, partnerships, messaging, communication strategy, and even hiring and investment decisions. All in the pursuit of finding unoccupied territory where you can win.

Porsche used category strategy to carve out a unique space that no one else had occupied: a “well-engineered” sports car with a unique driving experience. (Check out my deep dive on Porsche here).

Brands with a category strategy avoid playing the “better mousetrap” game. (That’s when you’re competing in a mature category and you’re trying to win with a slightly better product, by leaning heavily on price concessions, or by trying to out-hustle your competitors on sales and marketing.)

Here are a few more pointers:

• It provides a North Star for the product roadmap

• It’s a whole-company effort

• Businesses use a Strategic Narrative to capture their Category Strategy

Brand Strategy: How You Create an Emotional Bond With Your Customers

“Brand” is one of the most difficult to pin down terms in marketing.

Yes, it includes things like your logo, your tagline, or typography. But a brand is much bigger than those things. A brand strategy is how you trigger an emotional response from your buyers. Companies with a good brand strategy make a connection with buyers that’s deeper than the product itself – they add intangible value that can’t be replicated or copied by others. (This is the difference between a $50 Columbia fleece from Costco and a $200 one from Patagonia.

Costco and Patagonia both have brand strategies. Costco is about making your feel savvy for saving money; Patagonia is about making you feel like you’re being a good steward of the environment.

Brand strategy isn’t just for consumer products, though. Notion uses brand to convey the idea that software should be flexible and fun, yet powerful. Rows believes spreadsheets should be gorgeous. Palantir makes you feel confident. And for decades, IBM was the brand you could trust.

Here are a few more details about brand strategy:

• Unlike category strategy, brand strategy doesn’t have much sway over product

• Brand strategy is a marketing discipline (not a business one)

• Brand strategy should come after category strategy

Positioning: The Left-Brained Sibling to Brand

If a lawyer ever switched careers and became a marketer, I can totally see them drawn to positioning.

Unlike brand strategy, positioning is a left-brained, logical approach to describing how something is factually different from other things buyers might be considering. This includes both direct competitors but also substitutes and alternatives.

One question positioning answers is, “What is it?” For Starbucks, the answer for years was that the brand was a “third place” – not a coffee shop.

There are two big questions positioning can help answer. The first is “What is it?” For years, Starbucks wasn’t a “coffee shop”, it was a “third place” that provided people with a place to gather and work outside of their home or office. (Although now that’s changing).

Positioning also answers: “How is this different?” Today, plenty of locations might fit that “third place” definition. But Starbucks might say something like, “Unlike brands X, Y, and Z, we let our customers buy how they want, through drive-thru, mobile, and in-store ordering; we surprise and delight our customers through new menu items; and our baristas offer first-class service.”

Here’s what else you should know:

• Like brand strategy, positioning treats the product as a given

• Positioning is also done within marketing, typically by product marketers

• Positioning should also come after category strategy

You Must Know What to Work on When

Category strategy must always come first. Here’s why.

Let’s start with positioning. Positioning alone does not help you identify and claim new territory. To claim new territory, you must start by understanding some first principles: What territory is already occupied? What has changed in the world that has introduced new problems to be solved or new opportunities to be realized? Who is experiencing these problems, and why can’t they be solved today? What do we have conviction in that others don’t?

Positioning can help you create clarity between what you’ve already built and everything else that exists. But it can’t tell you want to create in the first place. Nor can it help you connect other pieces of your strategy holistically.

The same is true for brand strategy. Don’t get me wrong. I love a good brand. An emotional connection with buyers is a huge asset. And all else equal, having a brand strategy is far better than not. But focusing on brand strategy alone means you may overlook more foundational aspects of your business.

Improve Your Odds of Winning by Starting With Category Strategy

By starting with category strategy, you’re building your plans from first principles.

You’re finding a problem or opportunity that no one has claimed leadership of and using that as a lens for figuring out how to win A good category strategy doesn’t just inform your roadmap, your R&D budget, your partnerships, your GTM strategy–it unites them together towards a common goal.

With that foundation in place, brand strategy and positioning can serve as rocket fuel. Positioning will make it clear how you’re different, and brand strategy will create a bond that goes deeper than your product alone. Put all that together and there’s no reason you shouldn’t succeed. ✌️

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Thanks for reading. I run a consultancy called Flag & Frontier. I help clients define their category strategy, align their executive teams around their strategic narrative, and win their category.

Find out more about working with me by booking an intro call.

You can also say hello on LinkedIn 👋.

Cheers,

John