When working with our clients, finding the category they belong to is one of the essential aspects we focus on. We want to know which category they identify themselves in so we can narrow down the competition. Identifying a category or creating a new category helps their audiences relate to them.
But there are exceptions. Extreme situations such as war, trauma of all kinds, and terminal illnesses like cancer etc., are in this category.
At a conflict mediation training, a man called in from the war zone and asked the trainer how he could mediate his own anger and pain so he could take care of the orphans in the village where their parents were killed in front of them. He continued saying no matter what he tried, he couldn't tame the anger inside. The guy ended up with an empathy support but without an answer from the trainer.
It wasn't because the trainer didn't want to help him, but he needed something else – a specific trauma, grieving, and healing process for war survivors.
Extreme situations aren't the market norms. Instead of identifying the normal marketing category, we identify the situation as people suffering from war violence to consider our appropriate services. It helps us find the right lens in developing our offering and understand how they differ from serving people who aren't in these exceptions.
Like how marketing Acumen differs from Nike, extreme situations are their own category. Once we move out of it, the lens changes, too.
Finding a proper lens to see the people we choose to serve is at the core of marketing.
