I remember sitting next to someone at a conference, eating lunch, making small talk. And it came up that his brand had no competition.

And I said, ‘wow, what a dream position to be in.’ I was used to working with a competitive sales office, hyper-focused on differentiating from competitors. You know, us vs. them.

He said, ‘No, no, no. It’s not a dream position, it’s horrible. When you have competition, you know you’re going to get into a set amount of RFPs or bakeoffs, and win a certain percentage of them. When you have competition there is a line item in the budget to choose some vendor, you’ll get a certain percentage of those. We need to start from ground zero and tell them why they should even care about this category.’

Which is why I loved a lesson I read in a recent podcast guest application – creativity matters for category of one. I talked to Gary Stein, CMO, Virtuo (https://www.virtuo.com/), to learn the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories.

Virtuo has raised C$7 million (in Canadian dollars) to date, with the latest round led by ATB Private Equity and Telus Ventures.

Stein manages a team of ten, including agencies. He manages them remotely and he says they're a team that punch above their weight.

Stories (with lessons) about what he made in marketing

Here are some lessons from Stein that emerged in our discussion.

Creativity matters for category of one
Tell a compelling story that demonstrates the product
Get your data sorted
Always ask ‘what can we do with this’
Every click is a wish
Think like a challenger

Related content discussed in this episode

MeclabsAI.com can write your headlines, value prop, competitive analysis, and more – based on 10,000 marketing experiments. Totally FREE, you don’t even have to register (for now).

Data Pattern Analysis: Learn from a coaching session with Flint McGlaughlin (https://marketingexperiments.com/digital-analytics/data-pattern-analysis-coaching-session)

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This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages (https://meclabs.com/course/) free digital marketing course.

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Paul Kengor