5 types of ownable ideas (pick yours)
Why You Need an Ownable Idea (With 5 Examples To Help Find Yours)
Have you ever had to “make the case” for marketing to your boss or leadership?
Peter Drucker said in 1954 that a business has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. I heard that quote at our event earlier this year in Dave Kellogg’s presentation and I scribbled it down on the spot. Because most of us in B2B have been trained to think about marketing as the third or fourth priority. It always comes after product. After sales. After engineering.
But Drucker wasn’t talking about marketing as a department. He was talking about the fundamental act of understanding what the market needs and positioning your company to deliver it. That is “marketing” — and it’s why the most important thing in marketing is positioning. Not your tech stack. Not your channel mix. Not your budget. Your positioning.
Al Ries and Jack Trout’s core argument in Positioning (a book that is 40+ years old now) was that the battle isn’t fought in the market. It’s fought in the mind of the customer. You win or lose based on the mental slot you occupy. If you don’t deliberately choose that slot, the market assigns you one. Usually “another option in a crowded category.”
April Dunford says something similar in Obviously Awesome: most companies don’t have a marketing problem, they have a positioning problem. The ads aren’t underperforming because the creative is bad. The sales cycle isn’t long because the SDRs are slow. It’s because the company hasn’t defined what it is, who it’s for, and why anyone should care. Fix positioning and the downstream metrics fix themselves.
When I look at companies where marketing “isn’t working,” the instinct is always to swap the tactic. New ad format. Rewrite the landing page. Different email sequence. But the real problem is almost always upstream. The story isn’t clear. There’s no reason for a buyer to choose you over the twelve other companies saying roughly the same thing.
I was talking to Katelyn Bourgoin about this recently (full video here). Katelyn is a serial entrepreneur, buyer psychology expert, and founder of Unignorable, an agency that helps founders distill their thinking into one idea that makes them impossible to ignore. She has this concept she calls an “ownable idea” and I thought it was a really useful way to rethink positioning beyond some of those books. Katelyn broke down five types of ownable ideas.
5 Types of Ownable Ideas You Can Take Inspiration From
1. The coined category.
This is the one most people think of first. You create a new type of solution or market space and position yourself as the obvious leader. We did this at Drift with “conversational marketing.” Amanda Natividad did it with “zero-click content.” When it works, it works incredibly well because you’re not competing in someone else’s frame of reference. You’ve created and named your own.
Katelyn’s take on this is worth noting though: category creation isn’t always the answer. Too many companies force it when they don’t need to. If the category already exists and you’re just slapping a new label on it, people see through that. “The first AI-native purpose-built solution for HVAC contractors” is not a category. Nobody remembers that.
2. The coined problem.
Instead of naming a new solution, you name a problem that already exists but nobody has words for yet. Seth Godin has “the dip.” Andrew Chen has “the law of shitty click-throughs.” Brendan Hufford talks about “checkbox marketing.” Febreeze created “nose blindness” and sales spiked because suddenly people had language for something they’d never thought about.
This is powerful because you’re not telling people they’re wrong. You’re giving them a word for something they already feel. At Drift, we made lead forms the enemy — not the end user. The message was never “hey, you’re doing it wrong.” It was “it’s not your fault. It’s the tools you were given.” That framing matters. You name the problem, you own the conversation around solving it.
3. The method or framework.
This is about a repeatable method or framework that becomes synonymous with you. The StoryBrand canvas. The Challenger Sale. I tried to do this with my book Founder Brand. These are particularly strong for expert-led businesses and service companies, but they can work in product companies too.
The key is that it has to be genuinely useful, not just a 2×2 matrix you made up to fill a blog post. It needs to be core to the DNA of the product. The goal is that people actually use it to make decisions or solve problems, and it becomes the thing they associate with you.
4. The identity label.
You create a name for the type of person your audience wants to become. Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacker” and an entire generation of marketers (myself included; at the time, sorry not sorry) tried to become one. That’s the power of a good identity label. People don’t just learn about it. They step into it.
HubSpot is another example — creating a generation of “inbound marketers” which gave so many people something to rally around. When someone says “I’m a growth hacker” or “I’m a full-stack marketer,” they’re carrying your idea with them everywhere they go.
5. This vs. that.
You create a this-versus-that distinction that changes how people think about their choices. Cal Newport nailed this with “deep work vs. shallow work.” You hear that framing and immediately start evaluating your own day. This type is less common because it’s hard to nail, but when it lands it becomes an elite form of positioning. It forces a choice. And once someone adopts your framing, they can’t unsee it.
So how do you find yours?
It all comes down to finding your central argument. Katelyn says that’s the foundational belief, the bet your company is making about what’s wrong with the status quo and what the market deserves instead.
Every founder who started a company in a competitive space made some bet about why the existing options weren’t good enough. Your job as a marketer is to find that bet and make it the backbone of your story.
But you can’t just ask the founder and call it done. Katelyn calls it the “expert’s paradox.” When you’re too close to your own thinking, it doesn’t feel novel or interesting to you. The founder might have genuine brilliance and not think to share it because it feels obvious to them. The classic “cobbler’s son has no shoes” situation.
So the real process is mapping three things together: what the founder believes, what the market wants to hear, and what nobody else in the space is saying. The overlap is your central argument. And once you have that, you can build one of the five types on top of it.
AI is flooding every channel with competent, forgettable content. The companies that have a clear ownable idea are going to cut through. The ones that don’t are going to sound like everyone else, because the machine is writing for everyone else too.
But then again, if we go back to the beginning of this email, the same advice has been true since Drucker wrote about it in 1954. Maybe nothing is changing after all?
– Dave
P.S. Does your company have an ownable idea? Hit reply and tell me what it is. Or tell me you’re stuck. I read every response. How are you working on positioning right now? In this “AI world” that we’re living in 🙂
