I'm a huge advocate for Sanity™, a content management system that sits behind most of our clients' websites. I'm not going to go into what it is or why we use it. What I am going to talk about is how they took a crowded market by storm.
Where other CMSs target the bill payers by focusing on ease of use and business value, Sanity took a different approach: They focused solely on the developer experience, targeting the engineers who build with it. In fact, in the first five years, you'd have been hard pushed to find anything on their website that resonated with anyone who couldn't write code.
A risky move. But it paid off.
Their developer experience is so well considered and so well loved that a community of engineers became Sanity's most powerful advocates, myself included. This army of ambassadors then did what engineers do: they went away and built things for the likes of Nike, Carhartt, Skims, Nordstrom and Spotify. And with them, they brought Sanity.
This got me thinking about other brands who built their success the same way — by worrying less about selling and more about finding champions.
For eighty years lego marketed exclusively to children. Stagnant and on the verge of bankruptcy they needed a new angle. It turns out that the audience who saved them had been there the whole time: adult fans, building elaborate models and attending conventions without any encouragement from Lego. Once acknowledged with the launch of kits for grownup collectors, sales rose 900%.
Gore-Tex was once a fabric component hidden inside other products. What they didn't anticipate was that hikers, climbers and cyclists would become so loyal to the technology that brands like Nike began displaying the Gore-Tex logo as prominently as their own. Once invisible, Gore-text is now worn as a badge of quality.
GoPro didn't target the camera market. Instead, they targeted extreme sports athletes and adventurers and gave them all GoPro cameras. Then leaving them to do what they do best, thrill seekers posted white-knuckle, edge-of-your-seat footage, all shot on GoPros. The product sold itself through the content it made possible.
There’s a lesson here. Your champions may have been overlooked for years. They may not be the bill payer or the end user. But if you can show them you care about them, they could become your most profitable sales team.
To capitalise on an unexpected champion, you need to be bold. Prepared to take risks. With systems in place to move fast and change direction without starting from scratch. Because you never know where your next champions will come from, or how long they'll wait for a reason to stay.