Category Design
Set your vision. Create your own market.
Category design strategy sets a vision for your company. It focuses on identifying and evangelizing a unique problem that only your company can solve.
Category design strategy is about being different, not just better. It requires mapping a problem to a market to achieve problem-market fit.
Category design is neither marketing nor is it about creating a new tagline and a nice story.
Category design is also different than positioning a new product into an established market with competitors and trying to capture market share — although, it is possible to create a new niche category and win by specializing in an existing market.
Building a category can take years and is core to company strategy. To become a category leader requires product or business model differentiation.
Category, product and AI strategy must working in synergy to make this a reality.
Category leaders can be established in companies of any size: from emerging startups; growth companies looking to pivot; or even Fortune 50 enterprises. Often creating, launching and evangelizing a new category can involve the whole company — although it may only apply to a breakout initiative, or new product family in a larger or more mature enterprise. It's also a valuable exercise when two disparate groups or companies come together to create something new.
Category leaders are everywhere. They take 80% of the market share, growth and value. Category leaders are different, not just better.
Here are some examples of category leaders —
Ride sharing
Online search
Electric Vehicles
Microblogging
Cloud Infrastructure Services
Smart watches
Inbound Marketing
Conversational Marketing
Account Based Marketing
Enterprise Communication
Category strategy isn't marketing.
See how it's different.
Category strategy
New problem—or an existing one solved in a new way
Focuses on the problem and category
No competition (It's a new space)
Category potential
Category marchitecture
Category ecosystem
Marketing strategy
Known problem
Focuses on the product and features
Positioning around your competitors
Existing TAM
Product roadmap
Partner strategy
Here's the process to define your new market category.
We lead workshops guiding you through the following steps —
Create a category point-of-view.
Identify the problem
Explain ramifications of not solving the problem
Declare your unique answer to the problem
Describe the solution, vision for the future
Select a name for your category.
Define the "container" for the problem
Represent the market type, nature of the problem, and audience who has the problem
Pick a unique name that other companies may want to use as they enter your market — having others come into your category helps you establish the category and your leadership position
Create your category 'marchitecture'.
Create a blueprint visual which illustrates the key components of the category — this will help when telling the category story and inform the category visual identity
Visualize the key category components that can easily map to your product roadmap — this is how you align the category problem to your solution
Launch your category.
Get the company on board to solve the problem
Create the category positioning and messaging framework and map it to your product messaging frameworks
Launch your new category to the world
Evangelize your category and the problem.
Evangelize and transform the market to understand your category
Build your category marketing plan to complement your product marketing — using category marketing to focus on the problem
Consider hiring a category evangelist to educate the industry on the problem and the solution
It's hard work to build a category on your own. We help map out your category ecosystem.
Identifying the right partners and building strategic relationships with them is critical to establishing category momentum.
We help identify the key the partner companies that you need to engage with in order to grow the category —then build the plan to get them on board.
DATASHEET
Learn more about Category Strategy.
Design your own category and own the market.
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Align your product strategy.
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