Hello there 👋

How's tricks?

A few months ago, we came across Botivo, a brand in the non-alcoholic space doing some really cool and interesting things with their messaging.

In a category that’s become flooded with brands shouting “0% ABV,” “hangover-free,” and “guilt-free sipping,” this brand barely mentions any of that.

Instead, Botivo have tied their drink to a feeling and a time of day, not a feature of their category.

We 💛 it when brands go beyond hygiene messaging and start to introduce copy that's emotive, own-able and starts to carve out space for them to become a Category of One.

So, in today’s email, we’ll show you how to evolve your messaging as your category matures and how to make sure your copy is putting you on course to be The Brand in your space, not just another take-it-or-leave-it commodity.

Before we get into it, let's take a super quick deep dive into the idea of category lifespan 👇

Depending when you launched your brand, you'll have landed at different stages of a category's lifespan. Here's a really zoomed out way of thinking about it 👇

Early stage: Emerging

This is where everything happening in your category is an innovation or feels very new. (Right now, we'd say that adaptogens and adaptogenic drinks are probably at this stage.)

In this stage, your novelty factors are enough to delight and intrigue customers into giving your product a try.

Middle stage: Growing

This is where more people are starting to be aware of your category and more competitors are entering the space.

Now, those hygiene factors start to emerge. The features that were a novelty start to feel like a collection of things that *everyone* in your space can say.

All in all, it becomes a bit harder to find your unique place in the category, but it's not too crowded. This is usually where you want to start to dial up your own brand personality and what makes you better than the competition.

Final stage: Maturity & saturation

This is where the category has pretty much reached maturity.

Norms and customer expectations are set in stone and almost everything that you used to be able to use as a differentiator has now become table stakes.

This is where you start to see your copy become less and less effective as everyone in the space is saying the same thing. That's why it's important to find a way to stand out or break free of the category altogether.

How to move beyond hygiene factors and into your own category👇

Obviously, what is considered hygiene is going to change quite wildly depending on the category you're in.

So, to break it down, we thought we'd look at a category that's rocketed from emerging all the way to saturation pretty much in the last 5 years... non-alcoholic drinks.

• No/low alcohol drinks expected to grow $4B by 2028 (IWSR)
• 48% of all drinkers now say they’re drinking less
• In 2020, only a handful of specialist AF brands were around. But by 2024, Diageo had acquired Seedlip and Ritual Zero Proof and total no/low-alcohol sales has doubled YOY.

In terms of life cycle, the alcohol-free drinks category has speed run all the way to Stage 3, with more and more players entering the space and features like "alcohol-free" no longer having the same novelty for customers.

However, a lot of alcohol-free brands are still stuck in the messaging trap of focusing on the hygiene factor (being alcohol free) and completely missing the delight factor 👇

If you look, almost all of these brands are defining their product by what they're not, rather than what they are.

What do we know about these drinks beyond the fact they're not alcohol, not going to get you drunk and are not the path to bad decisions?

Not much.

Which is a huge missed opportunity, because as the ISWR point out in their report on the AF market, "other drivers besides health and moderation are now increasingly important. Factors such as taste, availability and brand are becoming key drivers of choice, especially among younger consumers."

Escaping the hygiene trap: how Botivo created "The Yellow Hour" to shift their brand into its own category.

While most of the alcohol-free category is dominated by hygiene messaging (alcohol-free, no hangover, etc...) Botivo are super smart and only briefly mention that their aperitif is alcohol-free in passing.

That way, they've ticked the hygiene box so customers know it's alcohol-free, then they move on to talking about things that are going to make people want to try their brand... the experience of drinking a Botivo.

Check out these pieces of copy from their website👇

Notice how they've coined the phrase "The Yellow Hour" as a moment to "prioritise pleasure" and "clock off and set the stage for something new".

Love that. Super smart.

As you read it, it's almost impossible not to start to picture yourself sitting in a garden or on a balcony at 6pm relaxing and sipping a Botivo as the warm, golden sunlight breaks through the trees.

And because that mental image feels so concrete and tangible and real, it makes us want to make that mental picture a reality. It makes us want to buy Botivo to experience it for real.

(As we said last week, a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that using tangible, specific, and vivid language like this makes customers more interested in the brand, more trusting of the brand because they’re confident, and—most importantly—more likely to buy.)

But that's not all they're doing, either.

Their brand language is also expertly separating them from all the other alcohol-free drinks in their category.

Because while their category is dominated by abstinence-centric language, Botivo's "big-sipping" copy is all about indulgence and treating yourself.

Immediately, they stand out and are more memorable because they're different. (Double smart.)

But most impressively, they're also applying the same learnings that led KitKat to a three-year CAGR of nearly 18 % in the mid 2010s... tying your product to a specific time-based ritual. (Triple smart.)

As you read their copy, you start to associate Botivo with an end of the day ritual that transitions you from signing off of Slack to whatever comes next.

And by doing that, Botivo starts to transition their product from being just another alcohol-free drink into something else completely... it starts to become a staple for living your best life.

And that's wicked smaht, because studies have repeatedly found that our brains create new categories based around certain times or occasions or things that we do, even if the products within those categories aren't natural bedfellows.

How you can escape the hygiene trap and move your messaging to the next-level 👇

The path from being "just another brand" to a becoming a category of one all starts by spotting where your copy is just ticking boxes and where it’s making people feel something.

Step 1: Audit your big messaging.​
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Grab a coffee and take a screenshot of your homepage or your PDP (or both).

Then mark every headline, subhead and bit of body copy with one of these three labels:

• H for hygiene: this is the stuff your competitors also say but that customers need to know about your product or service.
• P for performance: this is what makes your brand stronger, faster, cheaper, etc... than the competition
• D for delight: this is bits of copy that speak to a vibe, a moment in time, or a shared identity with your customers. This is what makes you stand out.

Step 2. Dial up the delight.

Now, full disclosure, you can add delight to your copy in so many ways. You can dial up your brand voice, reposition your brand, speak directly to your customers' identities, introduce some humour...

But as we're talking about Botivo today, we'll focus on what they're doing really well: tying your brand to some kind of ritual or part of your customers' idea life.

So start by thinking of the moments that matter in your customer’s lives. Not on a practical level, but on an emotional, personal level.

Ask yourself 👇

• When are they most likely to crave things like comfort, calm, indulgence, energy, escapism...?
• What’s happening around that moment? Who’s there? Where are they?
• What do they want to feel in this moment?

Then ask: how does your product enhance that moment? Or better yet, how can it become part of that ritual?

Once you’ve found that moment, anchor your copy to that.

Just like Botivo, paint a scene, give the moment a name, and make using your product feel like a habit they want to start.

☝️ That’s how you make the leap from hygiene to delight.

Step 3. Make sure you don't ditch the hygiene entirely. Just demote it.​
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Being alcohol-free, vegan, sustainable, having free delivery... all of these things still matter. They matter a lot, in fact.

And while they’re not what’s going to win a customer over as a category matures, they're still going to be deal-breakers if you don't talk about them.

The solution? Sprinkle hygiene messaging throughout the page in the body copy, in the microcopy beneath CTAs, in your FAQs...

Basically, you want to let your delight/emotional messaging do all the heavy lifting but let the hygiene messaging comes in at the end to reassure them your product ticks all of the boxes.

TLDR: Headlines and ad copy? Aim to delight and charm. Body copy? Mix delight with what makes you better than your competition. Microcopy and FAQs? That's where you can dial up the hygiene messaging.

See you next week for more ways to do words gooder!

Peace and love ✌️ Jack and Joe co-founders, co-brothers and co-pywriters at Do Words Good​