Choose a market direction

1. The five directions

The aim given is a larger addressable market, meaning more possible customers. There are five options. The example is the law firm from SOP 94 — Pair the brand with what the ideal customer likes, which serves assisted-living center owners; each row shows what the move might look like for it. The options, in the order they are listed:

Direction	What it means	The law firm's example
1. Up market	Larger customers	Owners with assisted-living centers in several locations
2. Down market	Smaller customers	Owners of at-home care and mobile assisted-living services
3. Adjacent	A similar market, slightly different	Rehab facilities
4. Broader	The whole category	Every kind of senior-living center: hospice, end of life, retirement
5. Narrower	A slice of the market you already serve	Assisted living with 100 to 500 residents

Order is not the same everywhere. Section 2 takes the moves as narrower, broader, adjacent, up market and down market. A third order is also offered: up market, down market, broader, narrow and adjacent. Put briefly, all five grow influence and direction (the measures on SOP 92 — Measure brand as reach, influence and direction) by deliberately associating with bigger things that the largest group of your potential customers like, and reach grows further through more advertising.

Any move changes the audience. To make any of the five, start associating with the things your new market, your new ideal customer, likes. That changes your core audience, so your brand should change with it.

2. Make the move by changing what you pair with

Think of a brand as a bouquet. Loose flowers are not a bouquet, just as products, values, experiences and people are not a brand on their own. Tie many flowers together and you have a bouquet; tie products, values, experiences and the rest together and you have a brand. What you put in, where it comes from and how much of it you use influence the brand you end up with.

• Narrower. Say you want to serve only assisted living in one state, or on one business model, or above a certain size, or owned by funds. Talk a lot about those specific things and nothing else, until every flower in the bouquet is about them: from roses of many colors to red roses only. Over time the brand narrows.
• Broader. To grow the brand and maybe reach a wider audience, you might talk about every kind of retirement home, end of life, hospice and the other living arrangements for seniors. Wider still, you might talk about built real-estate communities in general, and then you might talk about investments in general, widening from there. In the bouquet, every sort of flower comes in, not only roses.
• Adjacent. You might talk only about things specific to end-of-life facilities. In the bouquet, red roses slowly give way to yellow ones: still roses, a different kind.
• Up market. You might talk only about the problems that matter to owners with several locations.
• Down market. You would talk more about what smaller providers, mobile care and at-home care people might find valuable.

Whichever way you move, the flowers have to match the bouquet you want. Add sticks and weeds and you create bad pairings that blur what the bouquet is, and the whole thing gets worse.

Flag: the adjacent example. The list in section 1 gives rehab facilities as the adjacent market and puts end-of-life care inside the broader move, as the bouquet account's own broader move also does. The bouquet account then gives end-of-life facilities as the adjacent move. This page does not settle which reading is right.

3. Judge every move by the net change in audience

One owner's pivot. When he started, he made only business content. As he grew, he began touching on other subjects, and the views followed, but he came to see they were the wrong views. So he brought his content back to business alone, and, unsurprisingly to him, more business owners paid attention and thought well of the brand again.

The same owner, again. His content grew wider and wider. He stopped drawing as many business owners and began drawing more would-be entrepreneurs, which was not his goal. So he had to change what he was associating with, to make sure he was pairing as much as possible with what his ideal customers liked.

Keep watching the response. Monitoring, all the time, how the audience responds to what you put out is how a brand stays healthy and keeps moving in the direction you chose on purpose rather than the one it drifts into by accident.

Only two things can happen. When you make a move, you either gain more than you lose or lose more than you gain. One-for-one swaps only happen on paper. The aim is to come out net positive on every move.

A good trade. When a small-town band makes it big, some of the original fans always object: they say the band sold out, or went corporate. Taking the big stage was a gamble, and a harder one than you might think: the band bet the loss of some of its local audience against exposure to a much bigger and broader one. It did lose some of those locals, and it gained far more than it lost. The same thing happened when one owner moved from rough, low-production videos to full productions about business: some viewers only wanted the rough videos, but more business owners preferred the better sound and picture.

A bad trade. If the same band then tries new music, it is another gamble. Some people will like the change and some will not, and if more hate it than like it, the band has a problem. The soft-drink protest advertisement on SOP 92 section 5 was this kind of trade.

The reliable path and the risky one. Doing more of what already works, improving it and putting it in front of more people is a straightforward and reliable path. Change is a higher-risk path with a possibly higher reward. Every brand change is really a brand bet: that you will gain more following than you lose, and that the people you gain will care strongly about what you sell.

The bottom line: losing some audience is part of life; make sure you gain more than you lose. Do not let five mean comments stop you from winning the 500 new people who like the new thing.

4. Recover from a bad pairing

Most brands happen by accident. They become whatever they appear next to and whatever people associate their stuff with. The owner takes every podcast invitation, sells to any customer and talks about whatever is trending, and then is surprised that nobody knows what the business is about.

Mistakes will happen. Sooner or later you will pair with the wrong thing, and one bad pairing can do real damage. Hand someone a bouquet of red roses with a rotten flower sticking out the front, and she might decide the whole bouquet is bad, or the brand is bad, or that a man she took for a model of good ethics turns out to have got a DUI. One ugly flower changes how everyone sees the whole bouquet.

Drown it out; do not try to erase it. You do not try to erase the DUI or pull out the dead rose. It happened, and nothing can undo it. What you do is overwhelm the bad pairing with far more of what the majority of your people actually like, until it shrinks into irrelevance. One musician said things people did not like, but kept putting out products people loved: a big televised advertisement, shoes, an album released after his so-called canceling. Across successive pairings the good outweighed the bad, and people still bought. The same rule, in one line: when you make a mistake, and you will, do not shrink away; double down on what your customers like.

5. The whole method, as adjusting

Know whom you serve (step 1) and what they like (step 2), advertise yourself alongside those things (step 3), and the brand grows. From then on, all you do is adjust (step 4): prune the bouquet, removing what your ideal customers do not like and adding what they do. Steps 1 and 2 are SOP 94; step 3 is SOP 95 — Climb the three levels of authority.

6. What this page does not decide for you

• Which of the five directions to take. The options are listed and worked; nothing ranks one above another. Not established on this page.
• How to measure a move's net gain. The rule is to gain more audience than you lose, watched continuously; the five comments against 500 new people in section 3 is an illustration, not a measure. How to measure a move's gain and loss: not established on this page.
• The adjacent example. Section 2 flags the disagreement and takes no side.

7. The checklist

Question	The answer
The five directions, as listed	Up market, down market, adjacent, broader, narrower
How to move	Start associating with what the new market likes; the brand changes with the audience
What to keep out	Sticks and weeds: pairings that blur the bouquet
How to judge a move	Net audience: gain more than you lose, on every move
The safe path and the bet	More of what works, done better, shown to more people; or change, higher risk and possibly higher reward
After a bad pairing	Do not try to erase it; overwhelm it with what the majority of your people like

8. What this page does not cover

Market research and sizing methods are not covered on this page. Choosing the ideal customer in the first place is SOP 94 section 5, and the measures of reach, influence and direction are SOP 92.