We had a heart rate monitor. The marketing said calorie tracker.
I’d spent years inside the wearables category before I ever walked into Scosche. So I knew a bit about the category positioning for various wearables.
I was there on day one of bodybugg, one of the first consumer devices that tracked your body around the clock. Then I ran the wearables category as category manager at 24 Hour Fitness, carrying Fitbit and the rest on our site, back when most people still didn’t know what a wearable was. I sat on CES panels in 2012 and 2013 next to the people building Fitbit and BodyMedia. I knew what these products were, what they did, and more importantly, what they were for.
So when I got to Scosche and saw their new armband, I knew immediately what I was looking at. A heart rate monitor you wore on your arm. Optical, no chest strap, accurate, and genuinely cool. Brand new at the time. A real product.
The problem wasn’t the product. The problem was the shelf they’d put it on. The category positioning was all wrong.
The marketing was calling it a calorie tracker. A lifestyle tracker. They wanted it sitting next to Fitbit and bodybugg, competing for the same customer. Except those were devices you wore 24/7. They tracked your whole day. This was a device you put on for your workout and took off when you were done.
Scosche didn’t come from fitness. They came from car audio. Great engineers, great product people, but they didn’t live in this world. So they didn’t see the difference between tracking heart rate during a workout and tracking calories across an entire day. To them it all looked like one thing. Fitness wearable. Same aisle.
It wasn’t the same aisle. And trying to stand in it was going to get them beaten by products that were actually built for it.
Category positioning isn’t what you sell. It’s who you’re standing next to.
Here’s the thing about positioning. You can call your product whatever you want. That doesn’t make it the thing you called it. Call a workout heart rate monitor a lifestyle tracker, and the customer who buys it expecting all-day tracking is disappointed by 9am. You didn’t win them. You set them up to return it.
The fix wasn’t complicated once we named it honestly. This wasn’t a calorie tracker. It was a heart rate monitor. And there was already a category for that: chest straps. People who trained seriously hated chest straps. Uncomfortable, awkward, you had to wet the contacts before every session. Here was an armband that did the same job without any of that.
That’s a fight you can win. Stand it next to chest straps, not next to Fitbit. Same accuracy, none of the misery. Suddenly the product’s actual strength becomes the whole pitch instead of an asterisk.
So we reworked the messaging. We stopped apologizing for what it wasn’t and started selling what it was. Heart rate monitor. Worn on the arm. Better than the strap. That was the entire story, and it was true, which is why it worked.
Even the name was confessing the problem. The product was called MyTrek. Your trek, your journey, the whole day ahead of you. That’s an all-day word, the kind you put on something you wear from morning to night. The name was arguing for a category the product didn’t belong in.
So we renamed it Rhythm. Rhythm is heart rate. It’s also music, and the armband had Bluetooth controls built right in, so you could pause and skip tracks from your arm without reaching for your phone in the middle of a set. One word, two jobs, both of them true to what the thing actually was. The name stopped fighting the product and started agreeing with it.
Once the category was right, everything downstream got easier. The copy wrote itself. The comparisons made sense. The customer understood what they were buying and why. We weren’t trying to convince anyone we were something we weren’t. We were telling the truth about what we were, to the people who actually wanted it.
That’s the part most brands skip. They pick the category they wish they were in instead of the one they’re actually built for. They reach for the bigger, sexier shelf because it feels like ambition. But the wrong shelf doesn’t make you bigger. It makes you the weakest option in a fight you were never equipped to win.
The right category isn’t the most impressive one. It’s the one where your product is the best answer in the room.
Scosche had the best answer in the room the whole time. We just had it standing in the wrong room.
If your product is great and the market still isn’t getting it, it’s usually not a product problem. It’s a category problem. That’s the first thing I look at, and it’s where the work starts. Here’s how I work through it.