Brand Part 2: Unstoppable Branding - Crack the Code with Blue Oceans & Archetypes

From 2024, before the cybersecurity focus. This is the most directly transferable of the three: Blue Ocean strategy and brand archetypes are the two tools behind a category of one, and a crowded security market is exactly the condition they were designed for. If every competitor claims the same detection, the same coverage and the same AI, this is how you stop competing on the axis they chose. See also why every cybersecurity website looks the same.

Blue ocean, and the category of one#

The core of this episode is the argument that a brand should aim to be the obvious choice rather than a marginally better option. Competing on the same axis as everyone else means being compared on that axis, and comparison on shared terms tends to end at price.

Nintendo is the worked example. Rather than race on processing power, it changed what the product was for and created a category where the specification comparison no longer applied. That is what a category of one means in practice.

Archetypes#

Archetypes are the method for giving a brand a consistent character that survives contact with many different people writing many different things. In our own work we tend to use a cocktail of about three, weighted, rather than a single archetype, because one alone produces a brand that reads as a caricature.

Why copying is a dead end#

The hosts are blunt about imitation. Copying a competitor puts you into a comparison you did not design, on criteria they chose. It feels like risk reduction and functions as the opposite, because the safest-looking option in a crowded category is the one nobody remembers.

What Attenborough teaches about storytelling#

A lighter thread on brand storytelling, and why the way a story is told does more work than the facts it contains. Feature lists describe. Stories make someone care enough to act.