Category design is a business strategy that helps companies define the terms of competition in their favor. Here’s an easy way to think about it. Conventional business strategy focuses on capturing market share from competitors. Think about an army fighting its enemy over a piece of land. It’s a zero sum game where capturing more
Category design is often led by the CMO, with much of the work executed by the marketing team. That’s why category design often looks like a marketing discipline. But it’s actually a business discipline that the entire company needs to support. Why? If category design was a marketing play, it would only be about narrative
I often hear people talk about category design as a “marketing strategy.” It’s easy to see why. Marketing often spearheads category design. And it affects that department as much as any other. But category design is actually a whole-company exercise. As such, it’s a strategy that only your CEO can decide to pursue. If you’re
Category design has one fundamental rule: you need to solve a new problem, or you need to solve an existing problem in a new way. That means that the problem your company chooses to address will serve as the foundation for all your category design efforts. Much of your product, marketing, and strategy decisions will
Udi Ledergor and the team at software rocket ship Gong had already secured their place as king of the “Conversation Intelligence” category. That’s why I was so shocked when they dropped this phrase from their messaging and began to pursue a new category – something they were calling “Revenue Intelligence.” After all, this was the
What’s one of the most mis-understood terms in marketing right now? The answer: POSITIONING. I hear this word thrown around all the time, but most of the time, it’s off the mark. But the thing is, how you’re positioned has huge ramifications for everything else that happens in your marketing funnel. Not understanding what positioning is (or
Equating “category creation” with having an “official” category on a site like G2, Gartner, or TrustRadius seems like common sense. But they’re actually different things. “Category creation” (or my preferred term category design) is about building a market where one previously didn’t exist. It’s more about showing the world a new way of thinking. Of making
How many different business models are there? Well, according to Mike Volpe, there are just two. You can either create a new category… Or you can carve out a niche in an existing one. Mike would know–he’s actually pursued both strategies. While he’s pursuing a “niche” marketing strategy as CEO of Lola.com, Mike helped built
When I co-founded a SaaS startup back in 2013, I wish I had known about category design. But back then, it wasn’t on my radar. The seminal book on the topic, Play Bigger, wouldn’t be written for another three years. But if I understood category design at the time, I think we could have taken
Category design isn’t just a business strategy reserved for startups. Take a SaaS company called Narrative Science. They’ve spent nearly ten years playing in the “Natural Language Generation” space. While they’ve seen some solid success, some major plans on their product roadmap recently forced them to rethink how they were positioned. Now, Anna Schena, Director
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