For the 106-year-old company Converse, the sale of athletic shoes used to be straightforward. Everyone wore Chuck Taylors. But times changed. Converse lost its edge in a crowded athletic shoe market in the 1970s, and by the end of the century filed for bankruptcy several times. You’d be forgiven if you don’t remember these struggles, as the Converse brand is enjoying a great second act. Chuck Taylors are icons once again, and the brand’s sway in popular culture has never been stronger.
Converse’s comeback formula was equal parts generosity and introspection. They figured out what their best customers really needed, and mined what was great about their brand to give it them. They looked at the brand’s fiercest advocates and realized that many were musicians. Like the shoe industry, the music market was in the middle of major upheaval, and there was a dearth of affordable recording opportunities for bands. There had to be a better way to be generous and useful to them beyond a coupon or another ad campaign.
Thus the idea for Rubber Tracks studio was born.
Starting with just one location in Brooklyn, NY, Rubber Tracks has expanded into a global family of community-based professional recording studios. Emerging musicians of all stripes can apply for free studio time. If they are selected, they record at no cost while maintaining the rights to their own music. The brand asks nothing in return, not even in the fine print. Here’s a deeper dive on Converse and Rubber Tracks in this podcast.
So where does your brand’s best opportunity lie? The best brand strategies are about fit—when what you bring to the table matches what your best customers are missing. Lots of companies could have addressed the gap musicians faced. But Converse brought a brand that sees itself as a “blank canvas” for creative people. And they also had the imagination to ask a question no one else had asked—what if we created a world-class recording studio and opened it up for free to musicians?
Have you found (and more importantly, taken advantage of) a gap that provides a breakout opportunity for your brand to be helpful and useful? It’s a crucial question, because it’s no longer enough to communicate your brand position as a context for selling more products. To build the kind of engagement that drives consideration today, especially for products that demand a lot of research before purchase, you have to find opportunities for your brand to connect with customers.
Tony Magee, CEO of Lagunitas brewing, faced this kind of mismatch in the beer market and called it a Darwinian Gap. Charles Darwin’s theory, of course, describes how organisms that change physical or behavioral traits to best respond to changing environmental conditions will thrive. In business the same concept applies, although businesses and brands have to spark that evolution – first by asking questions about why the market is the way it is.
Here are a few steps you can take and questions you can ask to uncover the Darwinian Gaps—and your own brand’s best opportunity—in your market.
Look across your market and find the category “ruts” that trap competitors and customers. Where do brands in your category spend time and money going through the motions? What practices and realities in your category are consistently sub-optimal, to the point where customers and prospects assume they will never change? By taking a rut and turning it into an opportunity, brands can develop breakthrough strategies. Anyone who has suffered through years of boring airline safety videos surely saw Virgin America’s reinvention of the form (not once, but twice) as a true innovation that burnished the existing cool of their brand for fliers who saw themselves as in the know. In fact, six million people (and counting) watched the second video while sitting on the ground.
Avoid the brand blind spots that almost every company falls into. It’s a quality venture capitalists admire in startups: an obsessive focus on why their solution is the one the market has been waiting for. The danger is falling into the trap of hubris: assuming that the world thinks about your product category, challenges, and the solve for it (i.e., your solution) in exactly the way you do. This “brand exceptionalism” can come off sounding highly parochial. Rethink Robotics is a great example of a company that is inspired by its customers’ suggestions and incorporates them into the next revision of its human-friendly robots, machines that work alongside people and don’t require a team of programmers to get started.
Look for assets at the heart of your brand and business. Revisiting the origins of your brand shouldn’t an exercise in business nostalgia. Instead, focus on uncovering and re-examining the truths that define your brand’s birth and uniqueness. Now think about how those truths could drive differentiation in your market today. For example: What’s interesting or unique about the segments of customers who have really helped to build your business at key moments in your journey? What kinds of things could your brand do to unite and activate them? At Converse, the core brand value of a blank canvas was one the company drew on substantially to create Rubber Tracks, and when you think about it the fit is very consistent. Just as customers draw on their Chuck Taylors, bands can look at Rubber Tracks as a blank canvas they can perform on.
Build on your unfair advantages. Many brands seek to build structural advantages that are difficult to duplicate as ways to drive their business strategies. Find elements of your brand’s unfair advantage that can power unique marketing opportunities. For example: What elements of your business model would your competitors struggle to duplicate? What elements of your solution or offering would customers miss most if your brand disappeared overnight, and why? Waze, the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app, has the unfair advantage of 200,000 volunteers who create route maps that are more accurate than professional versions used on TV and radio. That’s why Waze offered their own maps to local new stations in L.A. and instantly became a household name in one of the world’s top traffic markets.
Let’s face it: Most of us work at established companies where our brands have defined roles and we have defined responsibilities in building them. We may have disruptive ideas, but much of the time we feel like we’re on the sidelines, merely observing the action.
And yet we can be inspired by the stories of companies like Converse. They not only asked questions that no one else thought to ask, they followed through on their inspiration and changed the market. Even in footwear and apparel, not too many brands have 37 million fans on Facebook.
It turns out there has never been a better time to inspire new brand opportunities, because we live in an age of asymmetrical advantage. We’ve left an era when leverage was all about scale, and big companies pushed homogenization on audiences that had no choice but to be receptive to it. Now we live in a world where leaders or start-ups have access to the same computing power, networks, and channels that everyone else does. And the influence of buyers who want and expect something worthy of desire, not something dumbed down, has never been greater.
Remember, the most probing questions you ask about your brand are really insights in disguise. And if you can ask them in a thoughtful way and act on them before anyone else does, you just may be the next person to turn a market on its head. Why take the risk? As the people behind so many thriving small, medium (and even very large) companies have found, life’s too short to run an ordinary business.
