When a business has a novel idea, there’s one challenge that almost inevitably follows: communicating the importance of that idea to potential customers, investors, and employees seems to require a herculean level of effort. Founders suffer especially from this challenge. They’re so close to the product that they lose sight of the big picture, and
Sometimes you’ll hear people describe category design as an “all or nothing” strategy. In this view, there are only two possibilities. One, your business has created an entirely new and separate category – one with clean lines of demarcation from existing categories. Or two, you’re simply competing for market share in an established space –
Every week or so I come across someone who loves the idea of category design but feels stuck because their current employer isn’t pursuing that strategy. It’s a bummer because as exciting and challenging as the work of category design can be, this way of thinking about business isn’t on the radar of most execs. And it’s
What’s worse than a weak point-of-view (POV) for your category? A great POV that no one hears about. For category design to work, your category POV has to be out in the world, evangelizing a position on behalf of your brand. It needs to elicit a response from customers – not collect dust in some
If you’re a growth-oriented leader who wants to help your business break free of crowded markets and avoid commoditization, then I want to share this presentation with you. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Empower B2B conference about a business strategy called category design. What is category design exactly? It’s an
Category design thinking isn’t just something that VC-backed companies with unicorn aspirations can use. When applied correctly, the category design lens can expand your addressable market and open up new revenue opportunities with existing customers. Really, we are talking about the development of what Christopher Lochhead calls a “breakthrough product or service.” And there’s no
Since category design is such a foundational business strategy, it will impact most areas of your company (if not every nook and cranny). So it’s natural to wonder if category design means you need to go through a rebrand. The answer is… it depends. In this post, I’ll share my approach to figuring out the
As a category designer, your Point-of-View (or POV) is a critical document for your category design strategy. If you’ve read Play Bigger (the original book on category design), you already know that will inform nearly every aspect of your category design process. When done right, it shows your customers (and your employees, investors, partners, the
If you read my last post, hopefully I convinced you why doing an internal category launch is such an important part of category design. But how do you do that? To show you how, I’ll break down the process we used at BombBomb, where I served as the VP of Marketing Strategy. First, here’s a quick refresher on why you need
Category design is warfare. You’re claiming new territory, and you need the means and the willpower to defend it. Indefinitely. With that in mind, have you considered if your team is ready for battle? In this post, I’m going to tell you why an internal category design launch is so important – and why skipping
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