Delight depends on who you are trying to delight. I teach this as a continuum. At one end are polarizing brands: BMW, Apple, Harley, Gucci. They charge premium prices. Their products are clearly different. Their customers feel intensely about them. At the other end are inclusive brands: Coke, Pepsi, The Gap. They win on scale and volume. They are for everyone.
Both ends are good businesses. The trouble starts between them. A brand that is a little premium and a little mass market has neither the intensity of the first nor the scale of the second. I call that place the you’re screwed zone. Know where you are on the continuum, and commit.
NETworth: a product that split the room.
In 1994, NETworth put stock quotes inside a web browser. Nobody else was doing it. When we showed it to people who understood markets, they reacted in one of two ways. Some dismissed it. The web was a toy, they said. Serious investors would never trust a browser. Others went quiet, because they saw what it meant.
That split was the signal, not the problem. The people who leaned in carried us. The Mosaic team at NCSA loved NETworth and put it in the browser’s drop-down menu. When Microsoft licensed the Mosaic code for Internet Explorer, the menu came with it. By the time Intuit called, about a hundred financial institutions used NETworth, including Schwab and Vanguard. A clearly different product loses some of the room. It wins the people who matter.
Either end works. The middle does not.
The firm stuck in the middle is almost guaranteed low profitability.
Affinnova: how the middle gets chosen.
At Affinnova our clients sat at the inclusive end: Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Unilever. I watched the same scene with client after client. A senior executive had a favorite package design her team had championed for months. In a live round, it held on for a few generations. Then it lost to a combination that looked a little odd: a color nobody on her team would have picked, paired with a claim her team had dismissed as too plain. “We would never have made that,” she said.
That is how the middle gets chosen. Nobody picks it on purpose. A team of experts imagines the options that look like what has worked before, and somebody senior picks the safest one. Each decision looks reasonable. Together they blur the brand. Even at the scale end, the customer chose the design that stood apart.
Michael Porter called a version of this being stuck in the middle: you lose volume buyers to the scale players and loyal buyers to the clearly different ones. Kevin Kelly’s essay “1,000 True Fans” shows the polarizing end is now open to a single creator. Neither recommends the middle.
Know where you are on the continuum, and commit.
Pick your side.
- Place yourself on the lineMark your brand between polarizing and inclusive. Use evidence: your price, how different your product is and how strongly your customers feel.
- Watch how the room splitsShow it to ten people. If nobody dismisses it and nobody goes quiet, you may be in the middle.
- Find the driftList your last three decisions on price, product or message. Mark any that were chosen because they were safe.
- Commit in one sentenceWrite which end you serve. Then say no to one thing that blurs it.
Quick answers.
What does it mean to be stuck in the middle in branding?
Rob Frasca teaches a continuum from polarizing brands such as BMW, Apple, Harley and Gucci to inclusive brands such as Coke, Pepsi and The Gap. Either end works. A brand that is a little premium and a little mass market has neither intensity nor scale. He calls that middle the you’re screwed zone, building on Michael Porter’s idea of being stuck in the middle.
Should a brand be polarizing or inclusive?
Rob Frasca’s answer is that either can win. Polarizing brands win on intensity and premium prices. Inclusive brands win on scale and volume. He learned at NETworth that a clearly different product splits the room, and that the people who lean in carry it. The mistake is drifting into the middle.
Sources.
- Rob Frasca, The Creator’s Journey (forthcoming), Chapter XI, Building What Lasts.
- Michael E. Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (Free Press, 1980), pp. 41 to 42. Wording checked against the passage as quoted by Robert Bruner, Darden School of Business. Source
- Kevin Kelly, “1,000 True Fans,” The Technium, 2008. Source