Finding the Category You Actually Belong To

Last week, I raised a simple question: what category are you in? The answer is significant because it tells you where consumers expect to find you in the store and what purpose you serve in their lives. As you can imagine, this affects everything you do, from your tactical trade calendar to your strategic growth plan.

In that post, I recommended a pulse check with 5 of your consumers. If you haven't done it yet, I still urge you. To understand where you belong, ask them:

• "If you had to describe my product to someone new, what would you compare it to?"

• "Tell me about the last time you reached for my product — what was going on, and if it hadn't been there, what would you have grabbed in that moment?"

The first tells you what you remind people of: what they compare you to when trying to explain you to a friend. The second is the moment in which you show up: what was happening in their life right before they reached for you.

Most of the time, those two answers move together. Butter chicken sauce, for example, gets compared to other Asian-inspired curry options (product comparison) by someone looking for a convenient, globally-inspired solution for a weeknight dinner (occasion comparison).

But there are times when a gap opens between the two answers. It's tempting to dismiss this as noise or consumer confusion. Instead, treat it as an important discrepancy.

Consider a kombucha drinker. Asked what they'd compare your product to, they'll likely say another kombucha. Reasonable — same shelf, same fermented-drink logic. But ask them what they'd have reached for instead, in that specific afternoon moment, and they might just say iced tea. Not because of the health halo, but because iced tea and you share the refreshment occasion.

Which category do you belong to, then: Fermented Drinks or Refreshment?

There's no single right answer here, but there is a right answer for you. It depends on what you've defined as your brand's purpose (why you exist) and hence, which battle you want to fight. Defending your shelf position against other kombuchas is vastly different from earning share of the afternoon-refresher occasion against iced tea — different competitors, different triggers, different reasons someone chooses you. One thing is clear: you can't fight both battles with the same messaging, the same trade spend, or the same story.

When the two answers agree, you're in a clear category. The job is to be the best version of it.

When they don't agree, that gap isn't a problem to smooth over. Instead, it's a choice that needs to be made.

And, if either of the answers diverges from what you think of your brand, that's another signal. The consumer is putting you in a category you haven't claimed yet, or one you've drifted into. The fix isn't more marketing. A louder version of the wrong story just tells the wrong story to more people. This is a strategy conversation.

The retailer often decides where you sit on the shelf. But the category you actually compete in gets decided somewhere the retailer can't see: in someone's kitchen, five seconds before they reach for you, or for something else instead.

That's worth knowing as you write next year's plan.