Glossary

Ambient Research

The strategy and technique of turning live promotional environments (trade shows, mixers, large client summits), into live research labs where marketing research is quietly conducted and obtained.

Arena Building

External positioning through environment, ritual, and sensory experience. It defines where a brand belongs and ranks in someone’s life, not where it resides on the positioning ladder inside their head.

Blue Pond

When a brand finds a small overlooked market gap their product can fill, that offers friction free adoption and the ability to scale organically. Think of it as a blue ocean that is land locked or contained between other categories.

Brand Resurrection

When a brand kills off a successful sub-brand due to a staregic miscalulation, then brings the product back hoping customers will forgive and forget the whole thing even happened.

Brane Cosmology

A system that turns a single feeling or emotion into an universe of experiences that can extend itself to infinite products.

Category Convergence

When brands in a category all adopt the same marketing norms that leads to creation of a genre of design and messaging. One that creates the risk of giving the category the appearance of being a commodity.

Cipher Strategy

When product targets two different and often unrelated audiences in the top of picking off enough people from two niches to gain a base audience of its own.

Controversy Hook & Pivot

The use of angled messaging and indirect tension to create curiosity without backlash. These engineered flare-up’s are then redirect attention towards what you actually want remembered.

Content Factory Syndrome

When an agency uses “thought leadership” to sustain content output for SEO algorithms, instead of helping educate clients seeking advantage.

Cult Over Charts (or Going Sidestream)

When a brand decides to build a loyal die-hard cult audience over a mainstream one due to a highly fragmented media landscape, budget constraints, or unusual uniqueness.

Ecological Brand Replacement

It’s when cultural niches behave like ecosystems. Remove one player will often result in another one who will evolves to fill the same role in the market.

Emotional IP

A brand that owns the emotion of a product, making it integrated into the product, and more than a benefit or feature.

Flipping Point

An event that lives between a “Tipping Point” and a “Black Swan”. It’s an event that flips quickly “overnight” without needing the slow-burn adoption curves of a “Tipping Point”, but has enough indicators to keep it form being blind like a “Black Swan” event.

Marketing Arbitrage

When a brand exploits identity, geography, and narrative to take advantage of gaps between markets. The gaps can include pricing, a less competitive landscape, or scarcity in availability.

Mind Jam

When a brand leaves a message intentionally incomplete to spike curiosity in the audience or to spur them to engage by filling in the missing parts of the message.

Narrative Jiu-Jitsu

When a brand facing a media fallout uses a narrative pivot to the change the plot mid-story. All with the goal of redirecting attention and reshaping perception before the original story becomes the accepted consensus or truth.

One-Hit Wonder Empires

When companies get a big hit, stop, then build an empire by creating a brand controlled cottage industry of products surrounding the big hit.

Overt Brand Nationalism

The use of patriotic language in marketing that has calcified into cliché, losing its persuasive power.

Patriotic Re-Positioning

When a brand shifts from origin-based pride (“Made Here”) to agency-based pride (“Led Here”). They decide instead to move from symbols to scenes, from geography to transformation.

Pocket Nostalgia

The strategy combining modern individualization along with a novelty layer to create a new product that is built on nostalgia.

Quality Fade

When inflation, tariffs, or other rising costs squeeze both companies and consumers at a rate the cost living can’t keep pace with. A brand is forced to raise the cost of their entry level product making them mid-tier. This leads the brand to create a new entry level product with cheaper components and less features to continue to serve an existing audience.

Self-Permission

When consumers opt in to marketing they are not targeted by to exploit the benefits of the offer.

Sellout Strategy

When a brand gives other’s brands narrative permission in it, giving them space to sell within the brand and a role in the brand’s story.

Speaking Saudade

The sophisticated use of absence in the form of “what if’s”, “what use to be”, and “what could have been’s” in marketing messages to form a deep emotional bond with an audience.

The Timing Trap

When a category-defining idea launches before the media system, audience behavior, and business model is ready or exists to support it.

Transitional Logos & Anchors

Occurs when a brand, heavy in iconography, seeks a new audience and doesn’t want to drive away a dying core audience. Instead of a radical re-brand, they choose a transtionial design language that bridges where the brand is going while keeping enough recognizable elements to comfort the dying base.

Trench Targeting

When a brand decides to market as deep as it can into a single niche, once the depth is reached, they introduce an wide array of new products that custom fit the brand and audience.