Brand categories: A primer
“To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.” —Stéphane Mallarmé
One of my favorite games to play as a kid was something we called “categories.” One of us would pick a category, any category. Flowers, colors, animals. We would then alternate naming things in said category until we couldn’t think of any more things, or until whoever liked to follow the rules even as a child would say something like that’s not a [flower/color/animal]. As a kid who thought an afternoon alone with a complete encyclopedia was the purest form of entertainment, I thought categories were useful—a way to make sense of the sheer vastness of human experience.
As an adult, I think categories can be useful in organizing or navigating options—think: aisles of a grocery store—but otherwise limiting. When it comes to understanding the sheer vastness of human experience, there’s a lot more complexity and nuance than the index of a 1990s Encyclopedia Brittanica would suggest.
At A Hundred Monkeys, our clients often ask us if we can help them define a new category for their brand. The answer is largely dependent on whether what they’re doing is significantly different to warrant a new term in the first place. If they’re just trying to create a category so they can be in a field of their own, without any real justification for it, we’ll proceed with caution. There’s enough hot air on this planet already. And no catchy term can make people adopt it over an existing term that just as easily applies. You can call the kettle midnight shadow all you want, but it doesn’t mean your customers won’t say it’s black.
If you’re in the position to create a new category, it probably means you’re the first. Being first can be exciting, but there are disadvantages, too. Getting people to understand something new takes work (and patience). If you expect your new category to do this work for you, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. Just like a brand name, a brand category is really just a placeholder for a much larger process of crafting a meaningful brand that resonates in people’s lives.
A brand is always a relationship between a company and its customers. Sometimes it’s only in retrospect that you realize this relationship has yielded something entirely new. As a brand, you can put a lot of time and energy into it. But you don’t always get to dictate how that effort will be perceived.
We often say branding is a lot like life. Maybe in the context of categories, this means that when a company is young and still making sense of the world, defining a category can help focus their brand, feel out where they belong. As a company gets older, categories serve mostly as tools for organization and navigation—both internally and for external audiences. Most importantly, you don’t always get to be the one who’s in charge of the rules, who gets to say what’s a flower and what isn’t.
