What business are you really in?

I was talking with a potential client this week, and something they said stayed with me long after the call ended. They weren't asking how to build a better product. They were asking a much more interesting question. "What business are we really in?"

It sounds obvious. Yet I suspect it's one of the most overlooked questions in strategy. Most companies define themselves by the category they already occupy: coffee, hotels, deodorant, or betting.

Once that definition becomes fixed, innovation usually follows a predictable path. Better ingredients. More features. Lower prices. New packaging. Incremental improvements that make you slightly more competitive within the same set of rules.

But every once in a while, a company decides to change the rules instead.

Airbnb is a good example.

It could have competed with hotels by offering more choice or lower prices. Instead, it gradually expanded the conversation from accommodation to belonging. It stopped asking how people wanted to book a place to sleep and started asking how they wanted to experience a destination. Suddenly, the category became much bigger than hospitality.

AXE went through a similar transformation.

For years it was simply a deodorant brand. As culture evolved, the brand realized that young men weren't looking for another fragrance. They were trying to navigate confidence, identity, and what masculinity meant for them. That shift allowed AXE to move beyond deodorant into hair care, body care, and skincare, while telling a much richer story about personal growth.

The product portfolio expanded because the category itself expanded. That, to me, is what category reframing really means. It isn't about abandoning the category you're in. It's about asking a much more interesting question.

What role could this category play in people's lives that it doesn't play today?

When you answer that question well, growth often follows naturally. Not because you've invented something radically new, but because you've made your category relevant to needs it wasn't serving before. As we often say at Innate Motion, meaningful growth comes from becoming relevant to new needs, tensions, and possibilities.

Perhaps every leadership team should spend a little less time asking how to outperform competitors, and a little more time asking whether they're defining the game too narrowly.

Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn't building a better product. It's realizing you've been in a much bigger business all along.

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How can Innate Motion help?

Many organizations unknowingly limit their growth by defining their category too narrowly. At Innate Motion, we help leaders reframe markets through deep human understanding, category reframing, and opportunity space decoding. By uncovering emerging needs, cultural shifts, and new possibilities, we help organizations expand the relevance of their category and unlock more meaningful growth.

P.S. Want your business to feel more human and make a bigger impact? Let’s fix that! Book a free 30-minute consultation and let’s tackle your biggest or smallest business challenge together.

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