🥊   Own Your Niche
🏆   Win the Ties
🎳   Play Your Game
🥊 Own Your Niche
When I wrote Sticky Branding a decade ago, branding fell into two camps: big “B” and little “b.”
Little b branding is the tactics: brand identity, marketing materials, brand persona and storytelling, and developing a cohesive customer experience and reputation across all media.
Sticky Branding is a book on Big B branding, or strategy. It answers where to play and how to win, and how to position your business to be the preferred choice in its niche.
Over the years, my view of branding has evolved and hardened, from an aspiration to an assertion. Positioning is more than a strategy or a declaration. It’s the physical and competitive assertion to own a niche.
This combines two dynamic elements:
- Focus: Narrow your focus to a marginally served or growing market.
- Force: Build the capability and capacity to serve that market so completely that customers have no reason to look elsewhere.
The objective is to visibly own your niche: to be so good the only way to compete with your company is to buy it.
🏆 Win the Ties
When your customers cannot distinguish one option from the next, they tend to default to one of three choices. They will go with what they already know, what’s cheapest, or what’s available.
Owning your niche empowers your company to rise above the crowd to win the ties and repeat the buys.
Win the Ties: Focusing on a niche is a competitive advantage. You stop competing and behaving like your competitors, because your business is purpose-built to serve a defined market. You win the ties because you offer a better solution with better margins.
Repeat the Buys: Owning a niche requires building substance and true organizational capabilities that deliver clear customer results. Customers come back repeatedly because they appreciate the service, like the products, and get the results they want and expect.
Owning your niche is an ideal worth chasing: Selling becomes easier. Service becomes easier. And that frees up resources to do even better work for your clients more profitably.
đź“ŠÂ One Stat to Watch
10 Seconds
Hyundai assembles a car every 10 seconds at its Ulsan plant, the world’s largest auto plant. It produces 1.5 million cars a year.
🎳 ​​ Play Your Game
In any disruption, there are winners and losers.
Following attacks on Iran on February 28, gas and diesel prices soared. The oil shock drove up costs and inflation.
It’s a bad news story for most industries, but not all. The petroleum industry is booming!
In Q2 2026, ExxonMobil’s net income doubled to $14.5 billion, and Chevron’s net income increased nearly five times to $12.1 billion. On the refinery side, Marathon Petroleum, Valero, and Phillips 66 stocks are up 110%, 98%, and 75%, respectively.
In the mid-market, companies cannot control macro swings, but we can focus on growth opportunities.
Disruptions create uncertainty, which leads to predictable behaviors: Fight, Flight, or Freeze.
Freezing is a natural and common response to uncertainty, but it’s the worst option. You get left behind. The companies that fight become the next market leaders.
To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky, go where growth opportunities are going to be, not where they have been. Then fight like hell to mobilize your organization to tackle these growth opportunities.
Don’t worry about what your competitors or the politicians are doing. Play your game.
That’s good strategy. The world is undergoing seismic changes. How you decide to respond to these shifts will define your business’s future.
My dad taught me early in my career: It’s not about the business you have built, but the business you are building. What are you going to build next?
🤔 Thoughts on Today’s Issue?
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