We're still talking about location and how you find the good stuff - original insights and ideas before you take the rest of the team with you. And I am starting by talking about category thinking.  This goes counter to a lot of thinking in the USA and Europe where marketers like to think they can spend all their resources on selling products. Yesterday I said that you need to find a category to fit in first. Today I want to suggest that you need to think about what your product and brand brings to the category - how it adds to it. Try to compete apart from the category and you will get nowhere. But try to compete as if no other competitors are in the category and everybody including you suffers.

The greatest exponents of category marketing are to be found in Japan. Relentless is a terrific read if you can get hold of it which introduce the Japanese take on marketing. One memorable metaphor is the carrying of a Shinto shrine which is carried on the shoulders of devotees. The authors of Relentless say the customer is king and is carried on the shoulders of the brands which form the category.  One of the reasons why Japanese brands took over the west as fast as they did was that they didn't do what all their western competitors did and slug it out brand by brand. They marketed in swarms saying very similar things about their products. Office equipment is a particularly good example. The brands tended to promote the same new product features at the same time. Meaning that sales were proportionate to their market share. No one tried to outgun the others. And the consequence was that the market became educated on the new features because all the brands chose the same feature.  There is an apocryphal story that a Japanese company launched a pure orange juice on to the market and was forced to withdraw it because they had a unique advantage which disadvantaged their competitors! You may regard this as the worst example of a cartel. But this kind of thinking enabled Japanese products to become world leaders faster than any other companies until the arrival of the internet.

Adam Morgan's great book Eat the big fish is a modern western example of category thinking. Which is a reminder that a smaller company with less resources can outperform a much larger better resourced competitor. By differentiating a smaller nimble competitor helps to grow the category. Private label products create tougher competition and keep pricing under control. Manufacturer brands can't walk away becuase they need the distribution power of the retailers to sell in sufficient quantities though often it is only through the swings and roundabouts of price promotions that allow them to do so.  Brand leaders find that they have to look not to their own advantage but for the benefit of the entire category. They can't go it alone.  This is more than because of antitrust legislation. Overly powerful brands become deeply unpopular because they are less accountable and start to behave as if they are less accountable.  Which is why Microsoft is still frantically trying to reinvent itself as the flock of speedboats Nathan Myrvold talked about once. Internally this is how they see themselves but externally Microsoft has developed an image problem which is why they are suggesting that Windows 7 is your idea!