Anyway, to the topic... Category Design. This is the positioning statement that sits at the foundation of your brand. There’s no desire to create ‘me too’ brands. You’re in the business of breaking business conventions. You get the importance of differentiation. Category Design is the idea that you want your customers to associate to your brand. Your focus shifts to what makes you different (you being YOU, your product and your audience).

You don’t need me to bleat out the international brands that have already accomplished this. You know. Think Redbull. Think Apple.

Now, for many of us it’s an approach to marketing that evokes concern. Why narrow your market to a specific ideation? Surely wider audience remit is the route to growth?

No it isn’t. And far from it. This brings me back to the conversation around newsletter strategy. If you’re frustrating sending the same weekly email with the same template and the same messaging then considering your category and how you represent YOUR category is a route to greater engagement with your audience. Boy that was a long sentence. The gist is this. Do different. Lead the conversation. Make the shift from pinging out the 10% discount codes and start educating. You know stuff that will fascinate. You’re the makers. You have a process to share. You have a category to build.

And this is a huge challenge. When I discuss with my own clients how do we make what they make matter (the very core of marketing) it takes days and weeks to get to the stage of a definitive single sentence response. That response sets the foundation for your category. It’s a process of category design.

And it does take time. And it does become uncomfortable. But then you get it. And when you get it? Your customer gets it. And you then begin the build. Your newsletter is the easiest route to build from.

Over the next few lessons we’ll be talking about the specifics - the words, the imagery you use to build connection and inspire subscribers to make their purchase.

Here’s a delightful reminder of how you position your brand in the mind of your customer... it’s all in the words.

Thanks for reading.

That was the hypothesis behind the Significant Objects project.

The project saw the purchase of 100 insignificant products (each averaging $1.25). Weird stuff like a lighter-shaped like a small pool ball. The objective was to create narrative around those products and to sell them on eBay. To see what impact story had as an emotive selling technique.

Let’s look at the example of the Utah Snow Globe purchased for 99c. The writer Blake Butler composed a product description that began;

My granddad’s grandad had a box under his bed. If you got to open the box (you had to beg) you would find a little door. The little door had a combination on it hthat you had to know to get inside the second box, which I did. I had the combination tattooed on my spinemeat when I was four while on a trip to see the circus. The tattoo was free. My granddad’s granddad was very powerful and rich

The story goes on to tell the relationship between the boy and his great great great granddad (I had to work that out). And yes, it does draw out context to the snow globe itself.

End result? The globe sold for $59. People bought into the story, not simply the product. The product was insignificant. Suddenly, through the magic of words, the product had value. A value that could then be shared as that story is retold. Eg. how I found myself owning a Utah snow globe.

Your products are NOT insignificant.

So imagine where the storytelling mindset could take your sales?

The point? We need to become better storytellers. The above is an extreme example. It’s fiction (and slightly bonkers). But it worked. It really worked.

As you start to create narrative around your products. As you begin to talk about them in a conversational format you’ll begin to set yourself and your brand free of the traditional conventions that infest our product pages and our newsletters.

It takes guts. It takes creativity. It takes perseverance (the storytelling approach will come naturally to you soon). It takes doing. It’s the only place to start. Doing.

Setting your creative juices flowing and thinking about how you can make your products more attractive, more intriguing through the art of storytelling.

I’ll be sharing some more practical examples over the coming days.

Here’s an idea for starters. This is Hebtro.co. A Yorkshire brand that make great quality menswear here in the UK. All it started with an idea in the pub... not just ANY idea...

Thanks for reading.

Ways of working.
Definitions of success.
Ideas about productivity, ambition, creativity and progress.

We don’t choose them. It’s like we absorb them.

They arrive through our education, culture, platforms, algorithms and well-meaning advice. Over time they harden into rules. Defaults. Expectations. Things we stop questioning because everyone else seems fine with them.

Break Convention exists to question those defaults.

Not because I believe everything is broken. Because very little is examined. It’s what I’ve been doing in business now for 2 1/2 decades and I guess with/in music for longer. This is something my long-haired worldly-challenged teenage self would like me to write.

In business, we’re told growth is the goal, scale is the prize and speed is a virtue. That if something isn’t expanding, it’s failing. That visibility equals value. That busy means important.

In music, creativity is expected to be pure but profitable, passionate but sustainable, authentic but optimised. Art is encouraged, right up until it becomes inconvenient or uncommercial.

In life, we’re encouraged to optimise ourselves. To be more productive, more efficient, more available, more impressive. To turn curiosity into content and rest into something we have to earn.

None of this is accidental.

These conventions serve systems.
They don’t always serve people.

Well. Fuck that.

Break Convention isn’t here to provide answers or replacements. It’s not a how-to guide for doing things differently. It feels like I’m challenging myself as much as anything. It’s a place to slow down and ask better questions.

Why does this feel compulsory?
Who benefits from it staying this way?
What happens if I don’t play along?
What have we lost by normalising this?

Some of the writing here will be reflective. I’m hoping some of it will get uncomfortable. Some of it may contradict things I’ve believed, taught, or practised myself. Hell, from post to post I may contradict myself. I hope not, but if I do, cut me slack. I’m learning as I progress. Doing.

If I do, I’ll just pretend it’s intentional anyway.

This is not thought leadership. It’s not self-help. It’s not a brand.

It’s my body of work built around paying attention.

To tension. To doubt. To the quiet moments where something doesn’t sit right but we usually move past it.

Break Convention is for people who are no longer interested in performing success, optimising their identity, or pretending that the default path fits everyone.

You don’t need to reject everything.
You don’t need to rebel loudly.
You just need to be willing to ask whether the rules you’re following are still yours.

That’s where this starts. Thanks for reading.