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Category codes and when to break them

Lesson 17 of 20 in Brand strategy.

"Semiotics and the art of culturally-driven brand thinking" Dr Alex Gordon, Founder: Sign Salad · British Brands Group

Lesson

Every category accumulates conventions. Wine has a certain bottle and a certain typography. Toothpaste has blue and white and a stripe. Organic food has green, kraft brown and a handwritten script. These codes are how a shopper identifies a product in under a second without reading anything.

A positioning map with four competitors plotted and one empty quadrant.

An ink drawing of a dairy shelf of white and pale blue milk cartons with one identical carton in deep terracotta red, a hand reaching for it. — One carton breaks a single code and still reads as milk.

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Question 1, locked
A milk brand wants to stand out, so it launches in an unfamiliar container, an unfamiliar colour and under an unfamiliar name. Why does that usually go badly?
- Shoppers distrust an unfamiliar container because they assume it holds less
- Milk conventions are unusually rigid, so no departure from them can ever pay
- Three changes cost three times as much to produce, leaving nothing to explain them with
- The departures that work keep the category recognisable and break one code only. Three at once is a puzzle, and nobody in a shop has time for a puzzle.
Question 2, locked
Which of these words means this? “A convention so widespread it signals the category itself. The green leaf, the blue bank.”
- Frame of reference
- Salience
- Category entry point
- Category code
Question 3, locked
Which of these words means this? “The minimum a pack must do to be recognised as the thing it is.”
- Stakeholder interview
- Discovery
- Category entry signal
- Mandatory

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