Your product is disappearing into its category.

CPMs creep up, creative gets refreshed, the new batch performs roughly like the old batch, and the post-mortem goes in circles.

Everyone did their job (the team briefed well, the agency executed, the media buy was genuinely smart), and the numbers came back fine-not-great for the third quarter running (the two most deceptively brutal words in a performance report) with no clean answer for why.

Nobody names the actual problem because it's not visible from inside the brief. Every brand in the category is running the same playbook with a slightly different color palette, and the only things left to compete on are price and spend. UGH. 

An ad for light switches stopped my scroll at nearly midnight, and it had almost nothing to do with light switches.

The brand was Residence Supply. The ad showed someone swapping plain white plastic switches for warm brass against green walls, and the whole room transformed. The furniture hadn't moved, the paint was the same, but suddenly everything looked intentional.

They weren't competing with other switch brands. They were competing with interior designers, which meant a completely different buyer mindset, price tolerance, and briefness.

Suri (a $149 toothbrush, roughly three times what a Philips costs, and the people buying it know that) does the same thing. It's not trying to out-feature Oral-B. It's competing with Aesop and Dyson, the kind of objects you leave on the counter because you actually want to see them there. The brief that produced those ads was asking completely different questions than anything else in oral care.

The brands escaping that loop just said byeee. Literally, they're leaving the category entirely, on terms their competitors can't copy, reaching buyers who are less price-sensitive because the product stopped feeling like a commodity the moment the brief stopped treating it like one.

We call this The Great Category Escape. And we've created a framework below to discover that new world before the next ad brief gets written.

Most briefs ask what the key message is or what makes the product unique. Both questions keep you inside the old category (and if we're being honest, both have been answered roughly the same way for the last five briefs). These three go somewhere else.

What does your customer stop doing once they have your product? Behaviors, worries, routines they were stuck with before.

What do they start doing, feeling, or saying? What identity does the product let them step into?

If your product disappeared tomorrow, what would they actually lose? I'm not asking about the product itself. I mean the feeling, the shortcut, the story they tell themselves.

The moment you stop describing features and start describing what changes, the old category starts to loosen.

Vague feelings don't escape categories. Specific ones do. Two questions get you there.

Describe the single best moment of using your product. Specific time, specific context, and specific emotion. If the scene could describe any product in any category, it's not specific enough.

What would your customer text a friend the day after using it for the first time? I'm not looking for a review here. I want the actual sentence, probably sent at 10pm with an exclamation point they'd normally be embarrassed by, from someone who didn't expect it to work this well.

From those two answers, finish this sentence before moving on:

The feeling my product creates at its best is...

Both are specific enough that they could only describe one product. That's the test.

Find the brand in a completely different industry that already sells the feeling you just named. I'm not talking about a competitor. I mean a brand your customer loves and spends more on than they probably should.

Name the brand and why it creates the same feeling.

Choose your escape route.

Write down what that borrowed brand's advertising actually looks like. Does it close on product or close on skin? Is it editorial or energetic? What does it never show, and what does it consider beneath itself? That description is what your creative team needs before they open a single brief document.

One sentence anchors everything downstream. Targeting, hooks, casting, visual direction. If a piece of creative can't be traced back to it, it belongs to the old category.

Format: "We are not [old category]. We are [new territory], and our product is how people get there."

Write yours before running the prompt below. The sentence is the work. The prompt is just faster once you have it.

Fill in your answers from the three stages, then paste this in. Vague inputs produce generic outputs. I'll show you what that difference looks like at the end.

Weak input for Suri: "We help people brush their teeth with a better-designed toothbrush."

The output you'll get back: "Upgrade your oral care routine with a toothbrush as beautiful as it is effective." Could be anyone. Forgettable on sight.

Strong input, with the Aesop territory and the bathroom counter scene filled in: "The first thing you see every morning should be beautiful. Not hidden. Not embarrassing."

And the targeting brief that comes back isn't "people who buy electric toothbrushes." It's women who follow Aesop, who think deliberately about their spaces, who would describe their bathroom counter as considered rather than accumulated. That shift changes the audiences, the CPMs, and the conversion economics entirely.

That's what escaping the category is actually worth.

Most flat ads aren't flat because the creative team failed. They were handed the wrong material. The brief never left the old category, so the hooks sound like everyone else's hooks, the targeting reaches everyone else's audience, and the numbers come back fine-not-great (there's that phrase again) and nobody in the post-mortem can say exactly why.

The escape happens before anyone opens editing software, before the copy gets written, before the casting call goes out.

If you're tired of asking how to beat the competitors next to you on the shelf and ready to ask what more interesting world your product actually belongs to, run it through this framework before your next brief lands.

Because the next post-mortem doesn't have to go in circles. And fine-not-great doesn't have to be the ceiling.

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CPM
Cost per Mille (Cost per Thousand Impressions)

But also
Competing on Price More

Success happens when you stop trying to make boring products exciting and simply reframe how people see them.

💌 Before you vanish:
Wait a second…

Reply and tell me which product you ran it on. Genuinely curious where you escaped to.

More Ad-ventures coming next week!

The Creative Strategist
at The Marketer’s Memo