🛎️ The category is a promise

A week ago I was lying by a hotel pool, a little unhappy. The hotel itself was perfectly nice, and I liked it. What I couldn’t let go of was their positioning.

We’d picked it on purpose. The town we went to is one of the country’s big spa destinations, full of large hospitality establishments: hundreds of rooms, pools you could lose a small family in. That’s not really our speed. So we booked a smaller option, one calling itself a boutique family hotel.

What we got was a small hotel doing an impression of a big one: the same menu of spa services, minus the scale or budget to do any of them well. The staff reached for luxury-resort polish and landed aloof and detached. When the boutique act didn’t come off, I hoped the family warmth would make up for it. The personal touch, family-style food, a place with character of its own. None of it was there.

So I spent the first day by the pool turning it over, less annoyed than curious. The potential was right there, unrealized, so my marketer brain couldn’t switch off. I started playing positioning in my head.

So what went wrong?

This isn’t a “don’t go small” argument. Some of the best places I’ve stayed had twelve rooms and one gloriously opinionated owner. What sank this one was the category choice: they’d claimed one and honored almost none of it.

Because your category is a promise. Tell someone what kind of business you are and they load a set of expectations onto you: who you’re for, who to compare you against, what a fair price is, what “good” looks like here. However, choosing it is often just answering “what do we call ourselves” the first day the team gets together. It’s something we do once (usually, too early to really have the market insights to make a good decision) and largely forget about.

But that category name is also a yardstick: pick a category and you’ve handed the customer the standard they’ll measure you by.

Niching down was the smart instinct. Out-luxuring an international chain on a family-hotel budget is a fast way to lose. The miss came later, when they claimed a category the operation couldn’t back up.

The conversation I’d force

If they were my client, I’d put a handful of blunt questions on the table before any more “we’re calling ourselves this because that’s what we thought of on day one.”

• What type of place did the guest think they were booking, and can we be that on an ordinary day, not just our best one?
• What does this building, this budget, and these people actually let us promise every single week?
• If we commit to warmth, what do we stop pretending to offer? If we commit to luxury, what will we spend to earn it?
• Which category is more favorable for us to stand out from the places around here?
• What type of customer do we want to attract and what type of place would they find most appealing?

Their answers point to two roads, and neither is better than the other.

One is to truly be the family hotel: owners visible day to day, staff trusted to make a call for a guest without running upstairs to ask, the kind of warmth you can’t script. That’s the place for people who came for a personal connection.

The other is to chase the upscale luxury the building already hints at: putting down real money into the spa and the equipment, staff trained to that standard, prices to match, repositioned upward on purpose. That’s the place for people who want the boutique feel of somewhere upscale, minus fifty toddlers tearing around the pool in a sugar rush.

Which road is right comes down to those answers. The hard part is committing, because the hedge is what produced “neither.” You can’t sit between two categories and hope the guest grades you gently on both.

There’s technically a third road: invent a category nobody else is in. It’s the go-to choice of many SaaS startups and founders. Once in a while it’s right, but it’s a different kind of expensive. Teaching a market a new word for what you are takes years and a budget most businesses don’t have, so I’d almost never put it first. A topic for its own edition, so I’ll leave it there.

In real life, you rarely get to choose

Even picking between the two is a luxury you often don’t get as a marketer.

In a tidy world you’d settle the category before building the thing, and Philip Kotler, whose textbooks trained half the marketing profession, would back you up: the product itself is a marketing decision! The real world hands you a product and an offer someone else already decided on, and asks you to sell what’s there.

So the work gets harder. You take each category on offer, weigh what it expects against what you can deliver, and pick the frame where your strengths clear that bar with a little to spare, rather than the flattering one that sets a bar you’ll trip over every week.

It’s not the glamorous “founding marketer” work we’d be excited about, but it’s what I face daily, and I assume you do, too.

***

Floating in that slightly-too-cold pool, it clicked into place: the owners had built a perfectly good hotel, then wrapped it in a promise it couldn’t keep. That’s the trap. A category you can’t honor works against you, because it hands the customer a standard and then lets them watch you miss it.

So the real task is choosing a promise you can keep, then building everything around keeping it. That little hotel could have been wonderful as either thing. The one option it never had was both, halfway.

Promises matter,

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

Why Vibe-Led Content Sounds New But Feels Familiar | “Vibe-led content” is emotional marketing and storytelling in a new outfit, and Ann Gynn at CMI is refreshingly honest about it. The useful bit: a fresh name can reopen a conversation your executives had tuned out. Keep the fundamentals, and borrow the label when it earns you the budget.

Where creators fit in AI search infrastructure | Here’s a link I hadn’t seen anyone draw so plainly: your AI visibility and your creator/influencer program are the same project. Most brands optimize the content they own, while 90-95% of what AI actually quotes about you comes from third parties, creators, reviews, communities. So the way into the answers is to activate the voices the models already trust.

Content as a Service (CaaS): The Framework That Aligns Marketing With the Business | Content marketing is a service with real internal clients: sales, CS, product, each asset doing a defined job you can measure in win rates or support tickets rather than pageviews. If you work in B2B and feel like you’re serving five masters at once, this hands you a way to back the pieces that move a real number and let the busywork go. The whole point is fewer, better assets, tied to outcomes you can actually name.

👀 Two for fun

This educational product deep-dive | There are simple things out there that just seem to work and we never know quite how. This piece will show you the awesome mechanics of one of them. The whole website is pretty fascinating!

This take on the illusions of travel | I’m one of those people who always chases the “authentic” experience when I visit a new country, so this post helped me realize it’s not an on/off switch but more of a layer cake.

🐈 Weekly cat

Oh, behold the ever-elusive water cat.