Why I Brandify Categories Instead of Branding Products

I did not know I was brandifying

The thing was already in motion when I noticed it.

I had been writing about positioning for a few years, doing client work, building frameworks for myself, when I sat down and wrote a booklet called The 10 Commandments of Power Positioning. The phrase was not the point. I needed a way to talk about a kind of thinking I had been using for a decade that did not have a name in the marketing literature. So I named it.

What happened after that was the part I did not expect. People started asking for Power Positioning by name. Clients used the phrase in calls with their boards. Other consultants started referencing the framework. Eventually I expanded the booklet into a book, and the book carried the name into rooms I had never been in. A phrase I had coined to describe what I was already doing became something I could be hired to do.

That was not branding. Nobody had branded Power Positioning, because Power Positioning did not exist as a thing to brand. What I had done was draw a line around a way of thinking, give it a name, and then live up to the name long enough that the market began to recognize it as a category.

There was a reason I started naming things, and the reason had nothing to do with positioning theory.

I have ADHD. I have always used mnemonics to hold what mattered. In the first edition of my book Power Positioning, I had a chapter called “Hooked on Mnemonics,” a deliberate riff on the Hooked on Phonics product that was selling on every late-night television channel at the time. The chapter built on a principle I had already taught in the earlier 10 Commandments of Power Positioning booklet under the heading of top-of-mind awareness. Both were about how the mind hooks onto memorable phrases. The naming habit grew out of that same instinct.

When I taught positioning to junior copywriters, and later when I taught marketing part-time at a local college, I needed a way to hold the principles I was teaching well enough to teach them consistently. Coining a specific name for a concept turned the concept into a recall object. I could grab it again in the next lesson without rebuilding the explanation from scratch. The acronyms followed. FAME, OATH, QUEST, FORCEPS, IDEAL, CASE (formerly RACES) are all recall tools first and frameworks second. They earned the framework status because the recall held.

The market realization came later. If the names helped me hold a principle in my head, they did the same thing for a buyer. Someone hearing a coined term once is more likely to remember the principle next week than someone hearing a paragraph of explanation. The mnemonic constraint that came from my brain became a positioning advantage in the market. The thing that made the names useful inside my own head was the same thing that made them stick outside of it.

I did not understand that when I started. I was just trying to remember what I was teaching.

I did that move several more times before I had a word for what I was doing.

Revenue Architecture. The Bullseye Method. The OATH formula. The QUEST formula. The FORCEPS framework. IDEAL. The UPWORDS technique. Each one started the same way. I was doing the thing without a name for it, the thing was useful to clients, and at some point I named it so we could talk about it.

The naming was the move that turned the work into IP.

I was branding nothing. I was brandifying.

What branding actually does

Branding is the work you do on something that already exists.

A company already has a product. A product already has features. A team already has a name. Branding takes those things and dresses them. Picks the colors. Sets the tone. Designs the logo. Writes the messaging. Aligns the look across every surface the buyer touches.

That work is real and necessary. I have done it. I have hired others to do it. There are people in the field who do it very well and the discipline is older than most of us. But what branding cannot do is create the thing it dresses. The product was already there. The brand showed up later to make it recognizable.

Branding decorates what exists.

That is fine when what exists is worth decorating. When the category is established, the product is solid, and the buyer already knows roughly what they are looking for, branding is the right move. You enter the room as the better-looking version of a thing the buyer already understands.

The problem is the room itself. If the room is crowded, the better-looking version still has to compete inside a category somebody else named, on terms somebody else set, against alternatives the buyer is already comparing to each other. Better dressing does not get you out of that room. It just makes you a better-dressed competitor inside it.

Most experts who hire a brand consultant want to be chosen inside the existing room. The work the brand consultant delivers is good. The room stays the same.

What brandifying does

Brandifying runs the opposite direction.

The brand comes first. The thing forms around it. You name something into existence so that it becomes a thing the market can point at, ask for, argue about, hire you for. Once it has a name, it becomes a position in the room rather than a competitor inside it.

When I coined Power Positioning, I did not have a tactic I was relabeling. I had a way of thinking that I believed was distinct from how positioning was usually taught, and the way I made it distinct was by drawing a line around it and giving it a name nobody else was using. The phrase forced a separation. People who heard Power Positioning could not immediately reduce it to brand strategy or to Trout-and-Ries positioning, because the phrase signaled a different thing.

Whether the phrase was a perfect description of the principle is a separate question. What it did was create a referent. Once the referent existed, the work could be hired by name. Other people could describe the work without needing me in the room. The principle began to live inside other people’s vocabulary, and that is when it stopped being a personal insight and started being a category.

That is the move brandifying performs. It is not about taglines. It is not about logos. It is about creating the noun the market needs to refer to the thing you do.

The brand consultant brands the noun. The brandifier creates it.

Why most experts never make the move

Almost every expert I work with has at least one thing they are doing that nobody else does, or that everybody else does badly, or that they do in a way that combines disciplines in a specific arrangement nobody has named yet. The raw material for a brandified category is sitting in their work.

They almost never name it.

Some of the reasons are practical. Naming the thing feels presumptuous. The expert is not sure the principle is generalizable. The phrase they would coin sounds awkward when they say it out loud. The branding consultant they hired told them to use the category term the market already knows because it ranks better in search.

The deeper reason is harder to admit. Naming the thing makes it claimable, and claimable means defensible. The moment you name a category, you have to live up to the name, explain it, and be the one the market thinks of when the name comes up. That is exposure most experts have spent careers avoiding by staying inside the safer language of the existing category.

The brand consultant gives you a logo. You can hide behind it. The brandified category gives you a name. You cannot hide behind a name you coined, because you are the thing it points at.

This is the part the discipline does not talk about. Brandifying is a positioning move first and a marketing move second. The marketing comes for free once you have made the call. The call is the hard part, and the call is the one most experts decline to make.

How to know if the move is right for you

Not every expert should brandify. Some categories are too large to be claimed by one practitioner. Some practices are too tactical to need a name. Some experts genuinely want to compete inside an existing room, and there is nothing wrong with that.

The signals that a brandified category might be the right move are recognizable.

You catch yourself describing what you do with phrases that take more than one sentence to land. The market keeps reducing your work to the wrong category because there is no better word for it. You have written one or two pieces that articulate the principle behind your work and people quote them back to you. The most valuable work you do for clients is the work nobody else seems to be doing exactly the way you do it.

If those land, the raw material is there. What is missing is the name.

The name is not a marketing exercise. It is a positioning decision. The right name for your work is the one that, once it exists, makes the work claimable and defensible without forcing you to use the language of a category somebody else owns.

What brandifying produces

When a name lands, three things change.

The work becomes hireable on its own terms. A client who needs Revenue Architecture work hires you for Revenue Architecture, not for “marketing strategy” or “growth consulting.” The phrase carries the scope, the deliverable, and the position before the first call happens.

The work becomes referable. People who have not worked with you can describe what you do to other people who have not worked with you, because the phrase carries the meaning. Word-of-mouth begins to operate on the brandified noun rather than on personal impressions, which is the only way authority scales beyond your immediate network.

The work becomes durable. Other firms will eventually imitate parts of your method. They cannot imitate the name without crediting you, because the name is the thing the market remembers as yours. Imitation no longer dilutes your position. It reinforces it, because every imitator is operating inside a category you named.

Branding gets you a logo. Brandifying gets you a category.

The line

This is the line I would draw, after 35 years of running both moves and watching what each one produces.

Branding decorates what already exists. Use it when the room is already worth being in.

Brandifying creates the thing you get to own. Use it when the room is crowded, the language you have for your work is borrowed, the principle you teach has no name yet, and you have done the work long enough to know the principle is distinct.

I have spent most of my career doing the second one. I just did not know the word for it until recently. Now I do, and now you do, and the conversation worth having with yourself is whether the work you do has the raw material for a category you have not yet named.

If it does, the name is the move.

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