What Whiskey Can Teach Us About Marketing Startups

From Oglby on Advertising,

Take Whiskey. Why do some people choose Jack Daniel's, while others choose Grand Dad or Taylor? Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don't make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn't the whiskey they choose, it's the image. The brand image is 90% of what the distiller has to sell.

This struck me because it's an extreme position but so obviously true.

When building landing pages, we spend a lot of time thinking about benefits/features, which puts us in the headspace of the people we're selling to, which is good. But so much of software is aimed at everyone. Who is Google for? Who is Facebook for? Who is Twitter for? Who is Reddit for?

Compare that to whiskey or soap or most products. Because the products are so similar they're forced to lean heavily into branding/positioning. In software we can differentiate based on functionality so we don't focus as heavily on branding.

That works great for a huge company, but smaller products should use more branding/positioning.

DuckDuckGo managed to carve out a place for itself because it's the search engine for people focused on privacy.

Stripe can do everything GumRoad can, but GumRoad is built for creators rather than businesses.

If you're a creator looking to monetize, you'll choose Gumroad by default.

How can you change your branding to become the default choice for your customers?