Category Strategy
Category Strategy defines a vision for your company. It identifies a unique problem that only your company can solve.
Category design strategy is about being different, not just better. It requires aligning 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.
Building a category can take years and is core to company strategy. To become a category leader requires product or business model differentiation.
Category leaders are everywhere. They take 80% of the market share, growth & value.
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.
Category Strategy
New problem
Problem and category focus
No competition in a new space
Category potential
Category marchitecture
Category ecosystem
Marketing
Known problem
Product and features focus
Competitive positioning
Total adddressable market
Product roadmap
Partner strategy
We define your new category.
Create a category point-of-view or strategic narrative for the problem
Identify the problem
Explain ramifications of not solving the problem
Declare your unique solution to the problem
Describe the solution, vision for the future
Name 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 the 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
We help define your growth strategy for the new category.
After launching the category, we can define your category growth strategy, help align your identity, and build your category content plan.
Enhance your product with AI.
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