Dig

🎧 Play while reading: Dig - Mudvayne

What kills lightning in a bottle?

Often, the person holding it. Not the market. Not competitors. Not the economy.

The same bleak story has played out a gazillion times. A company strikes gold by finding a positioning idea that resonates. And then lets the lightning escape.

Why?

Success comes with baggage. A Trojan horse that smuggles in an identity crisis. Overconfidence fills the air. Consensus builds. Before long, a decision is made to expand the idea.

“We need to think bigger. Let’s broaden the appeal.”

Don’t do it. This is a trap. Another way of saying let’s smash the bottle.

Lightning in a bottle only exists because of the bottle. Because of the confinement.

Big ideas don’t start as big ideas. They start small and grow at a pace the mind of the market will accept. The bottle grows over time and the lightning inside with it. This is the journey CEOs have to captain carefully. Go too fast and it will crack.

The strength of the company comes from how it is perceived in the mind of prospects. The more focussed the underlying idea is, the more powerful it is. Expansionary pressures, personal ambition, and hubris work against that.

The bigger you try to sound, the more you appear like everybody else and the less you resonate.

There’s reasons for this. The only way to sound big is to reference something big that already exists. Or, is so abstract it means nothing.

Examples:

Already exists: Next-generation CRM

Means nothing: The platform for the future of work

⚡ Lightning in a bottle: CRM for tradespeople

A focussed idea equips you with a sharp point-of-view and newsworthy dialogue. Sounding big or like everybody else does not.

Broke the mother f**king mold

There comes a point where the positioning idea that got a company off the ground starts to feel like a ceiling.

The early traction is real, but the next leap feels like it requires something bigger. A broader remit. A bolder claim.

This is the crucial moment. And the answer often isn’t what company management thinks it is.

The move is not to change the idea. It's to amplify it. To ask: how does it become a dominant idea in the category?

Growth comes from deepening the idea, not diluting it.

It’s time to DIG in.

Develop it.

Yes, as the company matures the range of products, features and benefits it supports will likely grow with it. That's natural. That's the bottle expanding.

But every addition for each brand the company owns should serve the core positioning idea incrementally — reinforcing the narrow focus that made it resonate in the first place.

This evolves over time, and it does TAKE TIME, but there’s a core consistent idea underneath that doesn’t.

This is how Disney has been able to expand from Steamboat Willie to movies, theme parks, cruise lines and more. It took 100 years, relentless consistency, and surgical precision to tie everything together with a core idea that underpins it all.

The moment new additions start pulling in a different direction to quickly and too abruptly, the idea is not growing. It is being dissolved. It is causing cognitive dissonance.

If you're having expansionary conversations internally, bring your positioning to the table. Give it a seat. Let it speak for itself.

Because it has a lot to say.

Remember. Your original positioning broke the mold. It earned the traction. It is the thing prospects actually bought into, even if they couldn't articulate why.

Before it existed, your company was spinning its wheels. Sounding big didn’t help then, and it isn’t going to help much now.

Here's why expansion always feels so logical: what already exists is easy to point at. You can see it. You can reference it. You can build a slide around it.

But that's precisely the problem. It's been done before. You can't own it. And the more you do, the less prospects perceive you are the best at it.

What your focused positioning can become — how it could grow to become a dominate idea in a category — is harder to point at. It doesn't exist in that state yet.

The key is having the conviction to stick with it. To double-down and map out its strategic path.

Changing it can completely derail the potential growth of the company.

Or, turn out to be a death sentence.

You’re inviting it.

That's what companies are doing when they expand too aggressively into the familiar. Talking itself off the ledge, the wrong way.

Your positioning strategy has one answer to this…

BrewDog didn’t dig

You may have read the obituary. I did, just days ago.

Founded in 2007, BrewDog set out to disrupt the UK's “stuffy” beer market, dominated by tasteless lagers and old man ales.

Punk IPA was the idea. Raw, rebellious, aggressively specific. The poster boy of British craft beer. A middle finger to the Carlsberg-and-Fosters industrial complex.

It worked. Spectacularly. Unicorn valuation. Cult following. A generation of imbibers who felt like they were part of something.

Its focus and clear enemy gave it strength.

But success went to the founders’ heads more than the beer.

I watched the demise play out as a consumer. BrewDog shelf space was multiplying, but not in a good way. I shook my head each time.

Gin. Stout. Vodka. Rum. Sauces. Rubs. Lager. Alcohol-free beverages. Bars. Hotels.

They were drunk on line-extension.

Each decision probably had a business case. A TAM. A rational argument. And a view that the idea of BrewDog can grow to become the “punk” of every category it enters.

But the mind of the market doesn't attend those meetings. It just quietly started asking: “wait, what is BrewDog again?”

That question is the beginning of the end.

Ding ding. Last orders.

The business analysts will point at the contributing factors — founder controversy, workplace culture, unsustainable costs, competition, and toxic investor terms — and they all played a role.

But underneath all of it was a company that had stopped digging in and started spreading out much faster than the minds of prospects would allow.

The through-line that connects the company’s downfall is breaking the focus that made it successful. Everything else is a symptom.

The punk craft beer slot — the idea they'd earned in the minds of prospects — blurred.

Big corporate competitors didn’t take the idea. BrewDog handed it back by behaving like they were Diageo. One of the founders even invested in Heineken.

Imagine if BrewDog had held the line. Year after year. Doubling down on its idea with Punk IPA and it’s other American-hop based craft beer sub-brands.

Could Punk IPA have become the #1 selling beer in the UK? Maybe. BrewDog as a whole got to 7th in a relatively short period of time.

Could it have become a strong global brand? Maybe.

Compare that to Guinness — a singular, focused idea that dominates the stout category.

It’s not just the #1 stout, it’s the #1 beer in the UK. It achieved that feat in 2022, after decades of building the brand.

Just like a pint of the black stuff, ideas take time to pour out.

Instead — BrewDog suffered five consecutive years of losses en route to its recent demise into administration. £148 million in total. It’s brands and UK operations sold for £33 million. A company once valued at £1 billion.

They had lightning in a bottle. And they lost it by tipping every alcoholic concoction known to humankind inside.

Bombs away.

Back in your inbox soon. 🤘

Martin

Did someone forward you this email? Happens allll the time.

Subscribe to receive more content like this, occasionally. 👇