Category Strategy
We create a category that your company can lead.
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​Category strategy complements your product and company strategy.
Product strategy defines how your product works.
Company strategy defines how your organization works.
Category strategy defines how you want your market to work.
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The category focuses on the problem that you are trying to solve in the market, and can be considered as a "container" for the problem, that only your company can solve.
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Category leaders can often take 80% of the market share and market valuation, leaving everyone else fighting for the remaining 20%.
However, the number of companies in your market is potentially overwhelming. Achieving success up in a well-defined market is hard — as market leaders often take all.
For example in the "marketing technology industry", there are now 7000+ companies vying for market share in 2019!
See the graphic below from the Chief Marketing Techologist Blog.
Markets today are noisy, and the market leaders often take all.
Category Leaders are everywhere.
​There are so many examples of technology companies who have created brand new categories and have become the market leaders, including Apple (smartphones), Google (online search), Twitter (micro-blogging), and Microsoft (productivity software).
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In the Martech example above, even the sub-category of "Marketing Automation & Campaign/Lead Management" itself contains dozens of competitors.
However, one company stands out. HubSpot is a company, that early on established its own category called "Inbound Marketing". Years later, HubSpot is still a top leader in the crowed digital marketing tools category.
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The process to develop your category.
The key category strategy steps and deliveables include:
Interviews & Prework
Gather background on the problem.
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Category Name
Define the "container" for the problem.
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Reflects market type, nature of the problem, audience who has the problem.
Point of View
POV identifies the problem.
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Explains ramifications of not solving the problem.
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Declares your unique answer to the problem.
Describes solution, vision for the future.
Blueprint & Ecosystem
Create visuals for external roadmap "marchitecture" and partner ecosystem.
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Update product taxonomy to reflect category.
Get your company on board. Launch to the industry.
Internal Launch
Get the entire company on board to solve the problem.
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Brings everyone together across the company, product and category strategy.
Industry Launch
Plan to launch your new category to the world.
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Complement your product marketing effort.
Rolling Thunder
Launch numerous planned initiatives to transform the market to understand your category.
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Drive the momentum across your ecosystem with every event, further accelerating the category flywheel.