DRMG | Own the brand that drives demand.

Efficiency isn’t advantage.

‍Over the past five years, companies have poured money into AI, automation, marketing operations, personalization, attribution and creative optimization.

The efficiencies are real. But efficiency was never the goal. Growth is.

And your competitors bought the same tools. Optimization made everyone faster, not different.

The result is the category average, at scale.

So, now what?

Growth comes from advantage. Advantage starts with category strategy: deciding which position you can own, then giving every model, team, and agency a reason to build on it.
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"PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION IS GOING AWAY, ACT ACCORDINGLY."

—David Cancel, Entrepreneur (via Mike Troiano, G3 Ventures)

It has never been easier to build a competing product. Data, processing power, talent, AI and capital are more accessible and affordable than ever.

That means your advantage has a shorter shelf life. Competitors close the feature gap faster, and pricing pressure follows.

Most companies respond the same way: more features, harder selling, more campaigns. Product teams chase parity. Sales teams pitch incremental benefits. Marketing scrambles to keep up with everyone else’s priorities.

The result is a company working harder to look like everyone else.

SO WHAT DOES “ACT ACCORDINGLY” MEAN?

It means competing on position, not just product. It means:

Choosing the category you should compete in: whether to lead it, reframe it, or create a new one.
Defining the change in the world and the specific problem only you solve.
Inspiring before you explain, and serving before you sell.
Aligning your team, your tools and your agencies around one clear, consistent story.

That’s category strategy. Without it, teams chase trends, competitor moves and investor whims. With it, every decision builds an advantage your competitors can’t copy with a feature release.

"Dustin and Mike helped us distill a complex business idea into a clear and concise story that resonated with our target market. They captured the power of our platform and highlighted the problem it solves for our customers in a compelling manner."

—Joe Garafalo, Mosaic co-founder on their raise of $18.5M in Series A

You need a category strategy when...

You have product-market fit, but not message-market fit. Customers love it. Prospects don’t get it.

Your AI tools and agencies keep producing work that sounds like everyone else’s.

Competitors are closing the feature gap, and price is becoming the conversation.

You tried category design in-house, and it stalled somewhere between the whiteboard and the website.

Your team describes the company and product five different ways.

Your product sells itself to users, but not to the buyer who signs the contract.

You’re moving upmarket, downmarket or into a new market, and your story hasn’t moved with you.

category STRATEGY FOR A PRODUCT MARKETING WORLD

"If you've invented something new but you haven't invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product." - Peter Thiel, Zero to One.

Customers choose before they contact you. Whether they’re buying software, financial services, or a weekend in the mountains, they research, compare, and shortlist on their own, and more and more of them do it by asking AI. In B2B, 94% of buying groups rank their preferred vendors before first contact, and that favorite wins 80% of deals (6sense, 2025).

When a customer asks AI who to choose, it repeats whatever the market already believes about you. If you haven’t defined your position, AI will define it for you, as the category average.

That changes the CEO’s job. Positioning used to be a marketing deliverable. Now it’s what every model, team, agency and channel draws from.

Conventional demand generation chases the same keywords, channels, and audiences as the competition. It captures demand. It rarely creates a position. And as those tactics get more expensive and less effective, smart companies realize they need to build preference before the buying process starts. They just don’t know where to start.

‍DRMG’s category strategy system gives founders and CEOs a clear decision about where to compete and how to win.

It defines the position you can own, the problem only you solve, and the story that proves it. Then it turns that into a strategic layer your teams, partners, and AI tools all work from: one position, every channel, no category average.

DRMG builds breakout brands that define entire categories, through our RISE process.

From Seed and Series A to pre-IPO, DRMG has worked with them all.

Kimoby

Business Instant Messaging - A real-time, digital message and marketing system built for the now economy.

LumenAd

Advertising Intelligence platform to sync the data and discipline of media mayhem.

Mosaic

Positioned for the modern era of finance with the world's first Strategic Finance platform.

PFL

A new Hybrid Experience (HX) for our new attention economy.

PWR Lab

Developed Lived Experience (LX) data approach to wearables and digital sensors.

Telesign

Security and identification intelligence for the world's largest internet businesses.

THE DRMG RISE PROCESS

Companies stuck in the closed loop of differentiation frustration need to get out of the weeds. Our RISE process takes teams from confusion and commodity to category, clarity, and conviction in eight weeks.

Research

DISCOVERY AND DIAGNOSIS

There's a subtle but profound difference between what your business or product does, and what your customer can do with your business or product.

Qualitative stakeholder interviews
Qualitative customer interviews
Competitive analysis
Customer insights
Collaborative discovery workshop

Insights

CATEGORY AND POSITIONING

Our research is applied to define your distinct point of view on the world and the market, key points of differentiation, and the space you own in the market.

Identify the Big Change in the World.
The Problem We Solve
Key Competitive Insight (KCI)
Position platform
Category name

Story

BRAND AND WORDWORK

Complex products require clear and compelling narratives to inspire and illuminate the big change in the world and how you solve for that.

Brand themes
Messaging
Strategy story
Manifestos

Execution

GO-TO-MARKET ACTIVATION

How do you ensure the entire team understands and appreciates the opportunity and strategy, and their roles and responsibilities in it?

Collaborative plan of action
Day in life
Competitive landscape
Internal launch
Ongoing consultation

Team

More than 50-years of C-level expertise in consumer and B2B brand strategy injected into your team.

Dustin Robertson, Partner

Dustin has more than two decades of experience in B2C ecommerce and B2B SaaS, focused on leveraging digital strategies to create winning brands. Highlights include building Backountry.com, turning around Vegas.com for a successful exit, and subsequently moving into SaaS as CMO to build the ecommerce CRM (ECRM) category at Drip, and President to launch Data Navigation at Grow.com, as well as co-founder of Caddis, a D2C eye appliance brand, and board advisor to other companies.

Mike Geraci, Partner

20+ years of experience leading more than 50 brands in SaaS, Tech, Outdoor, Travel/Tourism, Conservation, and Finance through category, positioning, and creative strategy. Mike started as freelance writer, reporter, and TV producer before applying those media skills to PR, then Creative Director and Chief Strategic Officer and partner at creative agencies. Mike lives, works, and does market research in Jackson, Wyoming,

Not every company needs a new category