Owning a niche the category leaders ignore

The main deodorant category is owned by three companies with advertising budgets larger than this brand's annual revenue. Competing there meant a 42% ACoS for a position on page three — the brand was buying the privilege of being nearly invisible.

What it had not noticed was that its formula — no aluminum, no baking soda, no fragrance — is precisely what a specific, vocal and underserved group searches for. That segment carries around three hundred and ten thousand monthly searches and, at the time, no brand that had built its listings around it.

We stopped competing in the category and started owning a segment of it.

• Segment head term identified and targeted — the sensitive-and-reactive cluster, with its own vocabulary of irritation, baking-soda-free and fragrance-free terms.
• Listing rebuilt as a segment product, leading with what is absent from the formula, which is what this shopper screens for.
• Budget withdrawn from the main category entirely for four months, concentrating everything on the narrower fight.
• Reviews mined for segment language and fed back into copy, since this audience describes its problem in consistent, specific words.

The brand reached #1 on the segment's head term and took 27% of that segment, up from 4%.

Revenue grew 149% on a smaller advertising budget, and ACoS fell from 42% to 19% — the arithmetic of fighting where you can win. The brand still sells to the wider category; it simply no longer pays to be page three in it.