Recently, I attended the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference in Atlanta, and if you were comparing the mood there to a weather forecast, I would call it “partly cloudy”.

There was uncertainty related to tariffs, travel bans, higher interest rates, and sticky inflation. But there were also periods of sun, like a still relatively-strong consumer who remains eager to travel (particularly on the high end) and a potentially-warming outlook for lending. In the midst of this partly-cloudy forecast was one truly bright spot, a keynote from Jesse Cole, the owner of the Savannah Bananas baseball team, dressed in his characteristic bright yellow suit and hat.

Jesse and his wife resurrected a struggling, bankrupt, minor league baseball team, relying on creativity, showmanship, and exceptional customer service to transform it into what ESPN calls, “The Greatest Show in Sports.” The brilliance behind this team is their willingness to break the rules of what fans expect from baseball — a strategy similar to what I often recommend to clients when trying to position a new brand or reposition an existing brand. I call this tool the “paradigm shift.” In other words, like Jesse Cole, we are going to try to break the rules of the game to work to our advantage.

The paradigm shift involves looking at all the conventional category norms for competitor brands that play in their space and asking, “What are things that everyone is doing that have come to be expected, undifferentiated, and boring?” The answers often result in truly breakthrough thinking and solutions to positioning (or re-positioning) that set the brand apart.

One example I often use is a brand whose marketing team we worked with a few years ago. Barefoot Wines is the top-selling table wine brand in the country, with more than half-a-billion dollars in sales — and it’s successful precisely because it did what no other wine was doing at the time: rejecting snobby wine culture and making wine accessible to all. It’s a wine that breaks the rules. It’s playful, it’s unserious, and it’s purposely not for oenophiles.

• Where the industry had elegant, serious, fussy labelling, Barefoot had bright, happy, cartoonish labelling.
• Where the industry relied primarily on the 750ml bottle, Barefoot boasted a fat 1.5L bottle to give consumers more for their money (and it also stood out on the shelf).
• Where the industry paradigm was that higher prices equaled higher quality, Barefoot showed that a decent wine didn’t have to break the bank.
• Where the industry utilized its own stilted nomenclature, Barefoot communicated with plain, accessible, understandable language.

Another client of mine, The Glass Light Hotel & Gallery, part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection, lives up the brand motto of creating hotels that are “exactly like nothing else. The goal was to design a different kind of museum/gallery experience. In the words of my client, they wanted to “take the starch out of the typical museum experience”. So, we started by writing down all of the things that define the typical museum experience and soon the answers were apparent.

• Where museums were stuffy, our hotel was relaxed.
• Where museums were filled with cold marble, our hotel was filled with warm light reflected off glass and a warmth of service that made guests feel special.
• While a museum could feel lifeless and dull, our hotel was vibrant and entertaining.
• While a museum is filled with hands-off displays, our hotel would offer a truly engaging and interactive experience.

Art, as my client understood, had the power to transform your perspective, but so much of that lies in how you see it. So, we set out to deliver a new kind of experience for guests that would help them see magnificent works of glass art, discover how they were made, and as a result, “see life in a new light”.

Each touch point of the guest experience was designed to create a little wonder, a point of reflection [pun intended]. As a result, the hotel has consistently performed at the top of the brand portfolio for guest satisfaction and has been the market share leader since it opened.

These are just a few examples, but time and time again, the paradigm shift exercise — and the eventual results that follow — reveals the true power of going against the grain. So, instead of asking, “What’s everyone else doing?” and attempting to do something similar, think like Jesse Cole, question everything, and take a swing that breaks all the rules. You just might find that the result is a home run for your brand.