Incumbent Anchoring
Position your product as taking on a household-name incumbent, never as a new category.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 92%
Category-creation language fails in press pitches because reporters have no frame of reference and it's usually not true. Gerber's rule: frame the story as 'we do what [household name] does, but better for [reason].' The incumbent instantly gives the reporter context and a built-in conflict (underdog vs. giant) that makes the story worth writing.
Origin
Emilie Gerber's Six Eastern pitching doctrine; she explicitly rejects the category-creation and jobs-to-be-done framings for PR purposes, arguing they land poorly with reporters.
Core principles
- 01Reporters need an instant frame of reference; a known incumbent supplies it
- 02Underdog-taking-on-giant is inherently newsworthy in a way 'new category' is not
- 03Category-creation phrasing is usually not fully true and doesn't land with press
- 04Save category language for sales if you must — never put it in a pitch
How to run it
- 1
Name the household-name incumbent
Identify the well-known player a reporter already understands that your product competes with or improves upon.
Pro tip Put the incumbent in the subject line: 'company taking on Salesforce with X approach' does a lot of work instantly.
Watch out Avoid inventing a category name or marketing phrase for what you do — it signals hype and gives no reference point.
- 2
State the specific 'better for X' reason
Articulate concretely how you improve on the incumbent, ideally tied to a market fact (e.g. incumbent has only captured a small share).
Pro tip A metric about the incumbent's limits (e.g. 'still only 2% of the market') strengthens the underdog frame.
- 3
Let the reporter run the underdog narrative
Frame the news so the reporter can tell an underdog-vs-giant story rather than a feature-list product update.
Watch out A feature-list framing ('simple, seamless, streamlined new offering') reads like a customer email and usually won't become a story.
In the wild
Ramp's bill-pay launch was framed as taking on bill.com — a top-performing fintech IPO that had captured only ~2% of its market — rather than as a generic new B2B payments feature.
→ Landed a CNBC story (which normally skips product news); the next day CNBC's piece on bill.com's stock drop even mentioned Ramp.
Gamma's seed launch was framed against PowerPoint/Google Slides rather than as a new category, using the plain fact that half a billion people make presentations yearly.
→ TechCrunch headline: 'Gamma brings PowerPoint into the 21st century.'
Common mistakes
Positioning as a category creator
Reporters have no frame of reference for a brand-new category, and the claim is usually only partly true, so the pitch doesn't land.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders pitching a product or launch that competes with a recognizable incumbent
Not ideal for
Genuinely novel products with no comparable incumbent, or sales/marketing copy where category framing may still serve
From the transcript
“it's actually really great when you can talk about how you are doing what x household name does but better for X reasons and that…”
“instantly it gives the reporter a frame of reference”
“a lot of companies really want to position themselves as the first to do anything”
“was one of the best performing fintech IPOs public company that really had still only captured 2% of this Market”
From the episode
The ultimate guide to PR
Emilie Gerber (founder of Six Eastern)