A boring category is almost always a category nobody has looked at properly. Creative Orion is a branding and website design agency in India with physical offices in Faridabad, Gurgaon and Delhi, serving clients across Delhi NCR and PAN India. Most of the brands we build sit in categories nobody would call exciting: financial advisory, management consulting, industrial real estate, orthopaedic surgery, automotive workshops. In every one of them, the thing that eventually made the brand distinctive already existed inside the business before we started. We did not invent it. We found it, and then we found a way to show it.
A blender company spent $50 and changed its category
In 2006, Blendtec was a blender manufacturer in Utah that almost nobody outside the smoothie trade had heard of. Its new marketing director, George Wright, walked past the workshop one day and saw the founder, Tom Dickson, feeding a piece of timber into a blender. Dickson did this most days. It was how he tested whether the motor could survive real use. Everyone in the building had stopped noticing.
Wright noticed. He spent roughly $50 on a lab coat, a few props and a domain name, pointed a camera at Dickson, and released five videos under the name Will It Blend? The series has since been watched more than 200 million times. Blendtec has reported that retail sales rose around 700 per cent in the period that followed.
That number gets quoted a lot. It is not the interesting part.
The interesting part is that Wright created nothing. He did not write a positioning statement or commission a campaign. He filmed a durability test that had been running in that building for years, and in doing so he answered the only question a blender buyer actually has: is this thing strong enough? Watch an iPhone reduced to grey dust in forty seconds and nobody needs to tell you the motor is powerful. You have seen it.
Volvo did the same thing with a steering system
In November 2013, Volvo Trucks released a seventy-six second film in which Jean-Claude Van Damme stands with one foot on each of two trucks reversing down a runway, slowly sliding into a full split. It was made with the Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors and shot at an airfield in Spain. It has been watched well over a hundred million times.
Strip away the Enya and the sunrise and it is a product demonstration. Volvo had launched a system called Volvo Dynamic Steering, and the claim was precision and stability in reverse. That claim is unsellable in a brochure, because nobody reads a steering specification. But if two trucks can reverse in perfect parallel while a man in his fifties balances between them on his heels, the specification has proved itself. If the steering wandered by a few centimetres, the film would not exist.
Two very different budgets. The same underlying move: stop describing the attribute, start demonstrating it.
Jonah Berger has a word for why this spreads
Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at Wharton, has spent roughly two decades studying why people talk about some things and not others. In his book Contagious he sets out six drivers grouped under the acronym STEPPS. The first of them is social currency: we pass on the things that make us look good to the people we pass them to.
That is the mechanism behind both examples. Nobody shared the Blendtec video to help Blendtec sell blenders. They shared it because it made them the person who found the funny thing. Nobody shared the Volvo film out of an interest in commercial vehicles. They shared it because it was extraordinary and they wanted to be the one who showed it to you.
Berger’s point, and ours, is that social currency is not a property of exciting products. It is a property of well-observed ones.
Why this stalls in Indian B2B and professional services
Almost every business we meet in a so-called dull category says a version of the same sentence: this is a serious industry, that sort of thing does not work here.
What actually happens in those industries is worse than dull. Open the websites of ten financial advisory firms in Gurgaon, ten management consultancies in Bangalore, ten orthopaedic practices in Mumbai. You will read the same three claims trust, transparency, client-first over the same photograph of a handshake. A buyer comparing three of them has been given nothing to compare, so they fall back on price, or on whoever their cousin recommended.
That is not a serious industry. That is an industry where nobody has done the work.
The point to hold on to
Category convention feels like a rule. It is not one. It is what happens when every firm in a category copies whoever got there first, and then copies the copy.
How we look for the remarkable thing
1. Start in the operations, not the boardroom
The Blendtec idea came from a corridor, not a strategy session. So we ask to see the work. What does the team do every week that they have stopped finding interesting? What does the founder end up explaining to every new client, in the same words, because clients keep getting it wrong?
Souvenirr Spaces builds industrial estates and factories in Kandivali West and across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. In commercial real estate the reflex is to talk about amenities and floor plates. The specific thing about Souvenirr is who the buildings are for and how they are built for that use. That story was sitting in their site visits, not in their brochure.
2. Look for proof, not promise
The Original Joints Clinic in Bandra West, Mumbai, is led by Dr Pranjal Kodkani and works exclusively on joint preservation surgery, arthroscopy and sports injury management. Exclusively. Most orthopaedic practices list every procedure they are able to perform, because a longer list feels safer. The narrower position is harder to hold and far easier to believe. It is also the one a patient can check.
A promise is something you write. Proof is something a competitor would have to fake.
3. Give the buyer something to use
Astravise Services is a management consulting firm in Bangalore. We handled the rebrand logo, corporate identity and a new WordPress site and built a diagnostic tool called GCC Compass into the site. Consulting is bought on judgement, and judgement is invisible until you have already paid for it. A tool that walks a prospect through the firm’s actual thinking makes that judgement visible before the invoice. It is the same move as blending an iPhone, in a suit.
4. Say the specific thing, not the category thing
Global Solutions is a financial advisory firm at Emaar Digital Greens in Sector 61, Gurugram. Its name is one of the most collided in Indian business search it and you will find shipping agents, staffing firms and IT vendors long before you find the advisory practice. When the name cannot do the differentiating, everything else has to: how the service is described, how the offices are named, how the firm is referred to in every directory listing and byline. We qualify it as Global Solutions Gurugram everywhere, without exception, because in a crowded name space consistency is the differentiator.
Four questions worth running on your own business
Ask these with your operations team in the room, not your marketing team.
- What do we do every week that we have stopped finding interesting?
- What could we show a customer that a competitor would have to fake?
- What does a happy client say about us to a friend, in their words rather than ours?
- What are we the only firm in our city doing — and have we ever said so plainly?
If the fourth question has no answer, that is the real brief.
Where this argument stops
Two honest limits.
First, a demonstration has to demonstrate something true. Blendtec’s video worked because the blender genuinely was that strong. Volvo’s film worked because the steering genuinely was that precise. A stunt that proves nothing buys attention and then hands it straight back, usually with interest.
Second, branding does not manufacture an advantage that is not there. Some businesses really do compete on price and distribution and nothing else. If your product is identical to four competitors and cheaper than none of them, the answer is a product decision, not a design decision. We would rather say that in the first meeting than on the fourth invoice.
But that describes far fewer businesses than the number currently telling themselves they are boring.
Frequently asked questions
What does branding for a boring industry actually mean?
It means finding the specific, provable thing a business already does well, and building the identity, messaging and website around that instead of around category convention. It does not mean making a serious business look playful.
Does this work for B2B companies, or only consumer brands?
Both examples in this article are B2B. Blendtec sells commercial blenders to juice bars and cafés. Volvo Trucks sells to fleet operators. B2B buyers are people who talk to other people, and they share the same things everyone else shares.
We are a professional services firm. Is a distinctive identity a credibility risk?
The credibility risk runs the other way. When ten firms in a category make the same claim, none of them is credible, because none of them is checkable. Specificity is what makes a claim believable.
How much does this kind of brand work cost in India?
It depends entirely on scope strategy, identity system, applications and website are priced separately. We have published an honest breakdown of branding costs in India by stage of business.
Do we need to change our company name?
Usually not. A name is the most expensive and disruptive thing to change and the least often responsible for the problem. We recommend it only when the name is actively blocking recall or search visibility, as happens with heavily collided names.
Where does Creative Orion work from?
Creative Orion is a branding and website design agency in India with physical offices in Faridabad, Gurgaon and Delhi, serving clients across Delhi NCR and PAN India.
