I’m almost finished rereading the branding books by Al Ries and I’m making some notes. I’ll tell ya, what a way to make your brand a powerhouse! There were many amazing guidelines to follow but there was one reoccuring message that kept standing out. And that was the exact point in branding that many large businesses failed to stay on top of once they became famous.
Can you guess what that is?
It’s called narrowing your focus.
What does that mean?
Well, it means to provide a specific narrowed down solution to a specific problem for a specific audience and to never expand out of that category. Huh?
So, for example, Staples sells you office equipment, Optimize It. Designs provides you with design work, Amazon sells you books and Yahoo! provides you with a search engine.
So, what happens when Yahoo! gets famous, wants to grow more so they start expanding out of their category and now provide you with mail AND calendars AND directories AND news AND hosting AND on and on? Well, someone like Google steps right in, narrows its focus to search engines and kicks Yahoo! out of the race. Sure, Google still has news AND videos AND mail, but when I ask you what is Google, what’s your answer?… It’s a search engine! And what is Yahoo!? It’s a mail provider…AND a search engine…AND…
If you ask others, what is [fill in your company name]? Will they say ‘x’ or will they say ‘x AND y’? If someone asks you what do you sell, and YOU answer x AND y, be weary of it. You might be expanding your focus too much and letting competition into your territory. I’m going to think about this more for my business and see how I can also narrow my focus more.
Narrow does it!
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Filed under: Effective Marketing | Tagged: al ries, branding, marketing, narrow focus
