Success Patterns - Models for Continuous Positioning

In 2006, a small Swedish music streaming service launched with a bold vision to solve the music industry’s piracy problem. As CEO Daniel Ek reflected years later, ‘We thought, “The problem with music isn’t distribution or availability; it’s that distribution of music is restricted by archaic rules and business models.“’ Spotify’s journey over the following years illustrates a fundamental truth about market positioning: it’s not just that an organisation learns, but how it learns that determines whether it remains the obvious choice.

In its early days, Spotify operated as a Category Creator, defining what music streaming could be. In subsequent years, it shifted to a Community Cultivator pattern, building tools for artists and listeners to connect. Later, as competition intensified, it evolved into an Essence Translator, maintaining its core purpose of connecting listeners with content they love while expanding beyond music into podcasts and audiobooks.

Spotify’s ability to move between these distinct patterns—while maintaining a clear essence—offers a window into one of the most overlooked aspects of sustainable market positioning: the importance of having a coherent success pattern.

The previous chapters established learning as fundamental, introducing the systems, reflective routines and implementation rhythms required to evolve your positioning. But learning alone isn’t enough. The most enduring companies don’t just learn—they learn in distinctive patterns that align with their essence and market context.

The Pattern Recognition Challenge

When financial services startup Monzo began challenging traditional UK banks, industry observers wondered how a small challenger could compete against institutions with centuries of experience and massive resources. But comparing their approaches reveals something instructive: it wasn’t just what Monzo did differently, but the consistent pattern in how they approached change.

While traditional banks typically made incremental improvements behind closed doors, Monzo operated in a clear Community Cultivator pattern—publishing transparent roadmaps, soliciting feature ideas, and building alongside users through forum discussions. This pattern wasn’t merely a collection of tactics but a coherent approach to continuous positioning that permeated everything from product development to communication.

This chapter explores the recurring patterns through which organisations successfully maintain obvious choice status. These patterns aren’t arbitrary—they represent fundamental approaches to the learning-adaptation cycle that align with specific organisational capabilities, market contexts, and customer relationships.

The most successful organisations exhibit three key characteristics in their learning patterns:

Pattern clarity: They adopt a consistent, recognisable approach rather than borrowing fragmented practices from incompatible models
Pattern-essence alignment: Their learning approach authentically expresses their organisational essence
Pattern-context fit: Their pattern suits their market circumstances, competitive landscape, and internal capabilities

Nationwide Building Society illustrates this principle well. As a member-owned mutual founded in 1846, Nationwide has maintained relevance through dramatic technological and market changes. Its endurance stems not from copying high street banks but from a clear Essence Translator pattern—consistently reinterpreting its fundamental commitment to mutual ownership while evolving its expressions to stay relevant in modern banking.

When CEO Joe Garner took the helm in 2016, he didn’t abandon this pattern but reinforced it, articulating how mutual ownership creates tangible member benefits in a digital age. This pattern clarity provides a framework for decision-making and a consistent approach to market positioning that resonates with Nationwide’s 16 million members.

As former CEO Graham Beale observed, ‘Our mutual status isn’t just our ownership structure—it’s the lens through which we view every business decision.’ This demonstrates how pattern alignment creates a natural coherence between essence and market position.

Research across industries confirms this observation: organisations with clear, consistent learning patterns maintain their market positions more effectively than those with fragmented approaches, even when both possess similar capabilities.

The Success Pattern Archetypes

Four distinct patterns consistently emerge among organisations that maintain obvious choice status over extended periods. Each represents a coherent approach to the learning-adaptation cycle that creates a distinctive form of sustainable advantage.

The Essence Translators

Core Approach: Preserving fundamental purpose while evolving expressions to maintain relevance

Essence Translators excel at maintaining their core ‘why + how’ while continuously refreshing how this essence manifests in the market. Like a skilled interpreter translating a timeless story into a new language, they preserve meaning while making it accessible to contemporary audiences.

Apple epitomises this pattern. From the 1984 Macintosh to today’s ecosystem of devices and services, the company has maintained a design and user experience essence while evolving its expressions across product categories. As Jony Ive, Apple’s former Chief Design Officer, explained: ‘What has remained consistent is our fundamental approach of trying to achieve simplicity—not simplistic, but truly simple solutions that recognise the complexity of the problems people face.’

The Essence Translator pattern requires:

Strong, well-articulated essence that transcends specific products/services
Sophisticated understanding of cultural and market evolution
Ability to identify which elements are essence versus expression
Adaptive communications and product development
Balancing tradition with innovation
Strong narrative continuity across changes

This pattern thrives when organisational essence has enduring relevance but requires fresh interpretation for changing contexts. IKEA demonstrates this approach masterfully—preserving its ‘democratisation of good design’ essence while continuously evolving how this manifests through changing home lifestyles from the 1950s to today.

CEO Jesper Brodin reflects this pattern in IKEA’s approach to sustainability: ‘Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA with the idea of creating a better everyday life for the many people. Today, that means helping people live more sustainable lives without compromise. The essence remains the same, but how we express it evolves.’

The Essence Translator’s learning focuses primarily on market evolution and changing customer contexts. They systematically study cultural shifts, technological adoption patterns, and emerging lifestyle trends, then use these insights to refresh expressions while maintaining essence stability.

The primary challenge for Essence Translators lies in distinguishing between what’s truly essence versus temporary expression. When this distinction blurs, organisations risk either fossilisation (preserving expressions past their relevance) or identity drift (abandoning essence while chasing trends).

Key Performance Indicators for Essence Translators:

Essence recognition across evolving expressions
New audience acquisition while maintaining core following
Consistent purpose scores through changing expressions
Adaptation speed for new relevance contexts
Translation efficacy across different channels

The Category Creators

Core Approach: Setting and evolving the standards by which a category is defined

Category Creators don’t merely participate in existing markets—they create new ones and continuously redefine them. Their advantage comes not from playing the game better but from changing the rules by which the game is played.

Salesforce exemplifies this pattern. Beginning in 1999 with the radical “No Software” message that challenged on-premise enterprise software, the company has continuously evolved its category, moving from SaaS pioneer to ‘Customer Success Platform’ to comprehensive enterprise cloud provider. Each evolution expanded its market while maintaining its position as the category’s definitive player.

As CEO Marc Benioff has stated, ‘We’re not just selling a product; we’re constantly defining what CRM means in a changing world.’ This captures the Category Creator’s perpetual redefining approach.

The Category Creator pattern requires:

Strong vision for category possibility
Comfort with ambiguity and undefined spaces
Educational approach to market development
Significant investment in thought leadership
Leading indicator measurement systems
High tolerance for initial misunderstanding

This pattern proves especially effective in emerging or transforming markets where established categorisations no longer serve customer needs or technological possibilities. ARM Holdings illustrates this approach in the processor design space—continuously redefining what low-power computing architecture means as contexts evolved from mobile phones to IoT devices to AI applications.

The Category Creator’s learning focuses primarily on emerging possibilities and nascent customer needs—the signals that indicate where a category can evolve before the broader market recognises the shift. They invest heavily in identifying leading indicators rather than lagging metrics.

The primary challenges for Category Creators include the cost of market education and maintaining momentum through category maturation. They must also balance visionary positioning with sufficient pragmatism to drive adoption.

Swedish fintech Klarna exemplifies how this pattern applies to rapid growth contexts. Since 2005, the company has continuously evolved the “buy now, pay later” category, from a simple payment option to a comprehensive shopping ecosystem. Co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski observed, ‘We’ve gone through several transformations, but we’ve always been defining what frictionless payments can be—the category keeps growing as we expand its boundaries.’

Key Performance Indicators for Category Creators:

New category adoption rates
Thought leadership content engagement
Educational content effectiveness
Category definition ownership
First-mover advantage capture
Percentage of revenue from category innovations

The Community Cultivators

Core Approach: Building growth through deep community engagement and co-creation

Community Cultivators grow and evolve alongside the communities they serve, creating systems for co-evolution with customers. Rather than positioning themselves above or separate from customers, they position themselves within a community, facilitating its development while being shaped by it.

Unity Technologies demonstrates this pattern in the gaming development space. Since 2005, the company has built its game engine platform through deep integration with developer communities, creating systems where community needs directly influence platform development. The company’s success stems not just from its technology but from creating an ecosystem where developers contribute to each other’s success.

As Unity’s Chief Product Officer Brett Bibby noted, ‘Our roadmap isn’t just informed by our community—it’s co-created with them.’ This captures the Community Cultivator’s collaborative approach to positioning.

The Community Cultivator pattern requires:

Community-centric business models
Transparent development and decision-making
Substantial investment in community platforms
Balancing community input with strategic direction
Strong facilitation and community management capabilities
Shared identity between company and users

This pattern thrives in contexts where user expertise and collective intelligence directly enhance product value. Glossier evolved from Emily Weiss’s beauty blog “Into The Gloss” into a cosmetics powerhouse by maintaining a community-cultivation pattern—building products and content in partnership with its audience.

The Community Cultivator’s learning focuses on understanding community behaviours, needs, and evolving expectations. They create systematic feedback loops, often through direct engagement platforms like forums, user testing programmes, and co-creation initiatives.

Their primary challenges include managing community expectations while maintaining strategic direction, and balancing the input of vocal community members with the needs of the silent majority. Success requires sophisticated community management and an organisational openness that many companies find challenging.

Digital banking pioneer Monzo exemplifies this pattern in financial services, building their product roadmap through community forums and transparent development. Former Head of Community Beth Andres-Beck explained, ‘Our community isn’t an audience we market to; it’s a partner we build with.’

Key Performance Indicators for Community Cultivators:

Community engagement depth
User-generated content quantity and quality
Co-creation initiative outcomes
Community retention and expansion
Feature adoption of community-developed ideas
Community advocacy measurement

The Excellence Refiners

Core Approach: Relentless refinement of core capabilities with clear measurement

Excellence Refiners maintain their obvious choice status through continuous improvement in specific dimensions of excellence. Rather than dramatic reinvention, they create advantage through relentless, measured refinement of their core capabilities.

Toyota represents the archetypal Excellence Refiner, maintaining market leadership through decades of systematic production system improvement. The company’s sustained advantage comes not from sporadic innovation but from thousands of incremental enhancements guided by clear measurement systems and improvement processes.

As former Toyota Chairman Fujio Cho stated, ‘We don’t just build cars; we build people who know how to build ever-better cars.’ This captures the Excellence Refiner’s focus on capability development as the foundation for continuous improvement.

The Excellence Refiner pattern requires:

Deep commitment to operational excellence
Sophisticated measurement systems
Incremental improvement philosophy
Strong process discipline
High expertise retention
Long-term thinking over short-term gains

This pattern thrives in mature markets where fundamental performance dimensions remain stable but can be continuously refined. Japanese beauty company Shiseido illustrates this approach in cosmetics, maintaining market position through systematic improvement in product quality, skin science research, and ingredient efficacy.

The Excellence Refiner’s learning focuses on process improvement and capability enhancement—identifying precisely where and how existing operations can be refined. Their learning systems typically feature sophisticated measurement, detailed process analysis, and structured problem-solving methodologies.

Their primary challenge lies in avoiding the “incremental trap”—becoming so focused on refinement that they miss disruptive shifts requiring step-changes. Successful Excellence Refiners develop sensors for these inflection points while maintaining their improvement discipline.

For smaller organisations with limited resources, this pattern often provides the most sustainable approach. Welsh jeanmaker Hiut Denim demonstrates how the Excellence Refiner pattern works at smaller scale—focusing exclusively on making the best jeans possible through methodical craft improvement rather than expansion into other clothing categories.

As co-founder David Hieatt explains, ‘We’re not trying to be the biggest—we’re trying to get better every day at one thing: making jeans. That focus is our advantage.’ This illustrates how pattern clarity creates positioning strength even with limited resources.

Key Performance Indicators for Excellence Refiners:

Year-over-year improvement in key quality metrics
Process efficiency enhancement
Expertise development and retention
Problem identification and resolution velocity
Continuous improvement initiative outcomes
Comparison to industry benchmarks

Pattern-Context Alignment

Each success pattern thrives under specific conditions. The key to sustainable positioning lies in identifying which pattern best aligns with your organisational essence, capabilities, market context, and competitive landscape.

The Success Pattern Matrix provides a framework for assessing this alignment across four dimensions:

Market Maturity Dimension

Emerging - Category Creator often most effective
Developing - Community Cultivator typically strongest
Mature - Excellence Refiner or Essence Translator usually optimal
Declining - Essence Translator or Category Creator often necessary

Organisational Capability Dimension

Creation Strength - Supports Category Creator pattern
Refinement Strength - Enables Excellence Refiner pattern
Cultivation Strength - Facilitates Community Cultivator pattern
Translation Strength - Powers Essence Translator pattern

Competitive Landscape Dimension

Pioneer Position - Favours Category Creator approach
Challenger Position - Often suits Community Cultivator pattern
Leader Position - Typically supports Excellence Refiner approach
Defender Position - Generally requires Essence Translator pattern

Customer Relationship Dimension

Transactional - Often limits pattern options
Loyal - Supports Excellence Refiner approach
Engaged - Enables Community Cultivator pattern
Advocate - Facilitates multiple pattern approaches

Consider Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which has maintained market leadership through a clear Excellence Refiner pattern. In the mature semiconductor manufacturing market with stable performance dimensions (reliability, yield, power efficiency), TSMC’s sophisticated measurement systems and incremental improvement philosophy create sustainable advantage.

As founder Morris Chang noted, ‘We don’t try to reinvent semiconductor manufacturing constantly—we try to perfect it consistently.’ This alignment between pattern and context has enabled TSMC to maintain its position as the world’s leading semiconductor foundry.

Contrast this with British furniture retailer Made.com, which struggled with pattern misalignment. Despite strong initial positioning, the company attempted to combine aspects of different patterns—pursuing both direct-to-consumer efficiency and community-driven design without building the required capabilities for either approach. This pattern confusion contributed to its eventual collapse in 2022.

Pattern alignment isn’t static—it evolves as markets and organisations change. Consider Fujifilm’s successful navigation of the photography industry’s digital disruption. Unlike competitor Kodak, Fujifilm recognised that its Excellence Refiner pattern in film manufacturing couldn’t sustain its position as the core market declined. Instead, it systematically shifted to an Essence Translator pattern—preserving its chemical expertise essence while translating it to new categories including medical imaging, cosmetics, and data storage.

This transition required building new capabilities while maintaining essence continuity. As former CEO Shigetaka Komori explained, ‘We didn’t abandon who we were—we found new ways to apply our fundamental strengths in imaging and materials science to different markets.‘

Pattern Selection and Implementation

Identifying and implementing your optimal success pattern requires systematic assessment across multiple dimensions. The Pattern Alignment Diagnostic provides a structured approach:

1. Essence Assessment

Begin by evaluating your core purpose and values, founding story, current expressions, and customer perceptions. This establishes your essence foundation which must align with your pattern approach.

2. Capability Inventory

Assess your organisation’s capabilities against the requirements of each pattern:

For Essence Translators: Narrative skill, cultural awareness, design thinking, heritage management
For Category Creators: Vision articulation, educational content, thought leadership, risk tolerance
For Community Cultivators: Platform building, facilitation, co-creation methods, transparency systems
For Excellence Refiners: Measurement sophistication, process discipline, technical depth, continuous improvement methods

3. Market Context Analysis

Evaluate your category maturity, competitive positioning, customer relationship depth, and growth opportunities to determine which pattern contexts are most relevant.

4. Pattern Selection Decision

Using the insights gathered, identify which pattern offers the strongest alignment with your essence, capabilities, and context. Often, organisations have a natural pattern affinity based on their founding approach and leadership style.

For smaller businesses with limited resources, pattern clarity becomes even more critical. Hiut Denim illustrates how focused implementation of the Excellence Refiner pattern creates sustainable positioning for a company with just 20 employees.

Hiut’s History Tags—where each pair of jeans comes with a unique number that the owner can register online to document the jeans’ journey—demonstrates how even small companies can implement pattern-specific innovations. These tags create a continuous improvement feedback loop while building customer connection.

Co-founder Clare Hieatt explains, ‘For a small company like ours, trying to do everything would be fatal. By focusing exclusively on excellence in one dimension—making the best jeans possible—we create advantage that larger competitors can’t easily match.’

The Pattern Implementation Roadmap provides a structured approach for adopting your selected pattern:

Phase 1: Foundation building and capability development
Phase 2: Initial pattern implementation across key functions
Phase 3: Pattern reinforcement and performance optimisation
Phase 4: Pattern evolution and adaptation planning

Pattern implementation requires consistent application across all organisational functions. Fragmented approaches undermine positioning by creating customer confusion and internal inefficiency.

Pattern Evolution and Hybridisation

As organisations mature and markets evolve, success patterns often shift. Understanding when and how to evolve your pattern approach becomes crucial for sustained positioning.

The Pattern Evolution Lifecycle model identifies four typical phases:

Formation Phase

Initial pattern selection and capability building, where clear pattern choice creates positioning foundation. Tends to work best with singular focus on one pattern approach.

Optimisation Phase

Pattern refinement and performance maximisation, where systematic improvement within your established pattern yields increasing returns.

Adaptation Phase

Pattern stretching to accommodate changing conditions, where your core pattern remains but incorporates selected elements from other approaches to address new challenges.

Transition Phase

Shift to new primary pattern while maintaining strengths from previous approach, typically required when market fundamentals change dramatically.

Adobe’s evolution illustrates this lifecycle. Founded as a product-focused Excellence Refiner creating digital publishing tools, the company maintained this pattern through its optimisation phase. As technology shifted toward cloud computing, Adobe entered the adaptation phase, incorporating Community Cultivator elements through its Creative Cloud platform while maintaining its excellence focus.

When CEO Shantanu Narayen led Adobe’s transition to subscription services in 2013, the company entered a true transition phase, shifting to an Essence Translator pattern that preserved its creative enablement essence while fundamentally changing its business model and relationship with customers.

As markets mature, many organisations develop hybrid approaches that combine elements from multiple patterns while maintaining a primary orientation. The Pattern Hybridisation Framework provides a methodology for effective combination:

Primary-Secondary Pattern Combinations

Excellence Refiner + Community Cultivator
Essence Translator + Category Creator
Community Cultivator + Essence Translator
Category Creator + Excellence Refiner

For each combination, specific integration approaches ensure coherence rather than confusion. The most successful hybrids maintain clear pattern dominance rather than equal emphasis.

Singapore Airlines demonstrates an effective hybrid combining Excellence Refiner (primary) with Essence Translator (secondary). The airline’s renowned service quality comes from Excellence Refiner disciplines—sophisticated measurement, incremental improvement, and technical precision. However, the company also incorporates Essence Translator approaches to maintain its ‘Singapore Girl’ service essence through changing passenger expectations and market conditions.

CEO Goh Choon Phong explains, ‘We’re relentless about service quality measurement and improvement, but we also continuously reinterpret what premium service means as customer expectations evolve. These approaches complement rather than contradict each other.’

When market conditions necessitate pattern transition, the Pattern Transition Planner provides a framework for managing the shift:

Identify transition triggers that signal pattern change necessity
Build capability bridges that connect current and future patterns
Determine whether sequential or parallel transition approaches are most appropriate
Establish essence continuity mechanisms during transition
Develop communication strategies for internal and external stakeholders
Implement risk management throughout the transition period

Pattern Alignment as Competitive Advantage

The most enduring competitive advantage comes not from what you do but from how systematically you learn and adapt. Your success pattern—the distinctive way your organisation translates learning into positioning—becomes a signature that competitors struggle to replicate.

Pattern clarity creates three forms of sustainable advantage:

1. Decision Velocity Organisations with clear patterns make faster, more consistent decisions because pattern alignment provides an implicit framework for evaluating options.

2. Resource Efficiency Pattern-aligned companies achieve more with less because their learning investments concentrate in pattern-specific capabilities rather than fragmented initiatives.

3. Positioning Coherence Clear patterns create natural consistency across customer touchpoints, strengthening market position through cumulative impact rather than disconnected efforts.

Your success pattern isn’t just how you operate—it becomes part of how customers perceive you. The consistency of your pattern creates a distinctive rhythm that becomes part of your market identity.

As Arup’s Chairman Alan Belfield observed about his engineering firm’s Excellence Refiner approach, ‘Clients don’t just hire us for what we know—they hire us for how we think. Our systematic approach to technical problems has become our signature.’

The journey to becoming—and remaining—the obvious choice requires more than individual learning capabilities. It demands a coherent pattern that aligns with your essence, capabilities, and context.

The organisations that maintain obvious choice status over decades aren’t necessarily those with the most resources or the most innovative ideas. They’re the ones that have identified and implemented a success pattern that authentically expresses who they are while creating sustainable advantage in their market context.

Your success pattern is your learning signature—the distinctive way you absorb, process, and apply new information to maintain market relevance. By recognising which pattern matches your organisational reality and building the capabilities to implement it effectively, you create the conditions for sustainable positioning that competitors can’t easily replicate.

There is no universal ‘right way’ to maintain obvious choice status. The pattern that makes Apple successful would destroy Toyota, and vice versa. The key is finding the pattern that matches your essence, capabilities, and market context.

When your pattern aligns with these dimensions, positioning becomes more effortless and sustainable. You stop fighting your natural tendencies and start channelling them toward systematic advantage.

As we’ll explore in the next chapter, this pattern clarity provides the foundation for navigating the most fundamental tension in continuous positioning: the balance between consistency and evolution.

The Pattern Alignment Diagnostic: Finding Your Success Pattern

ESSENCE ALIGNMENT

Which approach best matches your organisation’s founding story and purpose?
- Preserving and translating timeless principles (Essence Translator)
- Defining and evolving new categories (Category Creator)
- Building and nurturing communities (Community Cultivator)
- Refining and perfecting core capabilities (Excellence Refiner)
What does your organisation value most?
- Meaningful interpretation of core purpose (Essence Translator)
- Visionary redefinition of what’s possible (Category Creator)
- Collaborative creation with users/customers (Community Cultivator)
- Discipline and measurable improvement (Excellence Refiner)
How would you describe your leadership approach?
- Thoughtful stewardship of organisational heritage (Essence Translator)
- Bold visioning of future possibilities (Category Creator)
- Inclusive facilitation of collective intelligence (Community Cultivator)
- Methodical development of systematic advantage (Excellence Refiner)

CAPABILITY ASSESSMENT 4. Rate your organisation’s current strength in these capabilities (1-5 scale):

For Essence Translators:

Narrative and storytelling skill ___
Cultural trend recognition ___
Design thinking approach ___
Heritage/tradition management ___

For Category Creators:

Vision articulation ___
Educational content development ___
Thought leadership production ___
Comfort with ambiguity ___

For Community Cultivators:

Platform building/management ___
Facilitation and engagement ___
Co-creation methodologies ___
Transparency systems ___

For Excellence Refiners:

Measurement sophistication ___
Process discipline ___
Technical depth in core areas ___
Continuous improvement methods ___

CONTEXT EVALUATION 5. What is your market’s current phase?

Emerging (new, undefined category)
Developing (growing, evolving category)
Mature (established, stable category)
Declining (shrinking, challenged category)

What is your current competitive position?
- Pioneer (creating new possibilities)
- Challenger (disrupting established players)
- Leader (defining category standards)
- Defender (protecting established position)
Describe your primary customer relationships:
- Transactional (primarily price/feature driven)
- Loyal (consistent preference for your offering)
- Engaged (actively interested in your development)
- Advocate (promotes and contributes to your success)

SCORING AND INTERPRETATION Calculate separate scores for each pattern based on alignment with essence, capabilities, and context. The pattern with the highest cumulative score typically represents your natural success pattern.

Implementation planning should focus on:

Building capabilities required for your primary pattern
Aligning learning systems with your pattern approach
Identifying beneficial secondary pattern elements
Creating measurement systems appropriate for your pattern

Remember that pattern misalignment creates friction that exhausts resources and undermines positioning. When your pattern matches your essence and context, positioning becomes more effortless and sustainable.