Kelford Labs Daily: Stand for something

“Everybody is looking for ways to build their businesses by expanding into other categories. Their real strategies should be to build their brands by dominating their categories. And often the best way to do that is by contracting their brands so they stand for something.”

— Al Ries, “Building a Brand Versus Building a Business”

If you want to grow, focus.

We think that if we expand into other categories, we’ll naturally create more opportunities.

But now we’ve just increased the number of people who don’t know about us. We’ve created a new problem—stretching our marketing pressure too thin—not a solution.

Instead, to get bigger, we want to tighten our offering to apply more marketing pressure where it counts.

We “break through” to the other side once a sustainable proportion of our target market knows about us, what we offer, and what makes us special.

Until we do that, we’ll always be pushing the boulder uphill. Adding more boulders doesn’t make things easier, it makes things harder.

But applying steady, increasing pressure right where it counts? That’s the sort of thing that compounds over time.

And it starts by focusing—by doing less for fewer people—so that those people tell more people about us.

Because we’re special. Unique. Different.

And singularly credible.

Read more:
Get better not bigger