The Endemic Media Illusion
Endemic media - A.K.A the publications, channels, and platforms that exist specifically for your category - are important. Of course they are. A surf brand should be in Tracks and Stab. A trail running shoe should be reviewed in Trail Run Magazine. A delicious chocolate bar should unsurprisingly get coverage in Delicious magazine - and so on.
But, not all surfers read Tracks. Not all trail runners subscribe to Trail Run Mag. And not all Choccie lovers read foodie publications. The audience for any endemic publication represents a fraction of the total audience you're actually trying to reach. And worse still, just targeting the die-hards of the category doesn’t represent growth.
Think about the buyer of a Patagonia fleece. Sure, some of them are hardcore climbers, surfers and adventure-lovers, who worship the brand and read every gear-review in the adventure titles they subscribe to. But, my mother-in-law also wears Patagonia, as does the owner of my local cafe… and I’m pretty sure wouldn’t define themselves as the “outdoorsy” type.
There's a huge chunk of people who just like to stay warm or want to be wearing the best-quality shell jacket for their everyday kit. They read the AFR Life & Leisure, they flip through Qantas Magazine on a flight to Melbourne, and they're discovering brands through Man of Many and Escape in the Sunday Telegraph. They will never read a single issue of Surfing Life. If Patagonia only showed up in outdoor and surf media, those people would never encounter the brand at all.
The Fragmented Audience Problem
Audience fragmentation has fundamentally changed what "reach" means for a brand, and most brands haven't caught up with it. Consumers no longer cluster neatly into the categories we'd like them to occupy. The surfer who might buy your wetsuit, is also reading Monocle and planning a trip through southern Europe. The mountain biker, considering your helmet, is also a wine enthusiast who subscribes to Gourmet Traveller. These people exist across dozens of contexts simultaneously, and the publications that reach them in those other contexts are far more likely to create a first touchpoint with your brand than a product roundup in a niche title they've never subscribed to.
This is the opportunity that most brands miss. By optimising relentlessly within their category, they leave enormous audience territory completely unclaimed.
Brands That Get This Right
Red Bull is a useful place to start. On paper, they sell energy drinks, but if they'd only appeared in the media their category occupied - convenience store promotions, sports nutrition coverage, energy drink roundups - they'd have been competing on price and shelf space indefinitely. Instead, they built a media empire that reaches millions of people across extreme sports, music, culture and lifestyle content. They appear in mainstream entertainment and travel press, producing content that sits comfortably alongside Rolling Stone or National Geographic. What Red Bull sells is energy drinks. What they've built is something closer to a cultural institution that uses those drinks as a revenue stream.
One of Compass’ partners, Loco Love is a cracking example. They’re a premium Australian chocolate brand that could easily be complacent and land themselves coverage in the typical foodie titles, but instead, they engaged Compass help them increase awareness of their brand outside of their category. In just a few short months, our team has had coverage appear in Fashion media like Russh and a bunch of broader mainstream titles such as; AFR Life & Leisure , Australian House and Garden , The Sydney Morning Herald and Style Magazine And unsurprisingly, it turns out they all love chocolate too!
What It Actually Takes to Cross Over
Breaking into non-endemic media isn't about blasting press releases at journalists who don't cover your category - that approach doesn't work, it burns relationships and is a huge waste of your precious time. It requires a different way of thinking about your brand's story. Instead of asking "what do we want to say about our product to our existing followers?", you need to ask "what is genuinely interesting about what we do to someone who has never heard of us?" That's a harder question, but it's a good one.
It also requires understanding the editorial priorities of outlets outside your category well enough to find a genuine intersection with your brand. A sustainability story that lands in a specialist outdoor title might translate beautifully into a business feature about supply chain ethics, or become a lifestyle piece about conscious consumption for a completely different masthead. The same core narrative can reach entirely different readers when it's positioned for the right publication.
The brands that do this well find the specific angles and story formats that feel native to publications they've never appeared in before. That takes real knowledge of the media landscape, and a willingness to show up somewhere unfamiliar.
The Real Opportunity
Category leadership is worth protecting, but it shouldn't be mistaken for the limit of what's possible. The brands that grow meaningful market share in the years ahead will be the ones who show up in editorial pages their competitors would never think to approach - reaching the business executive on a long-haul flight, appearing in the Sunday newspaper travel feature read by people who didn't know they needed the product yet. That's where new audiences live, and new audiences are where growth comes from.
If you're thinking about how to get your brand out of its category and into something bigger, we'd love to have that conversation. DM me or check out our site for more on what we do and what Compass is all about.
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