Category Strategy
Own your market category.
Category strategy focuses on identifying and evangelizing the unique problem that you are solving in the market.
Product strategy defines how your product works. Company strategy defines how your organization works.
Category strategy 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.
Markets today are noisy, and the market leaders take all.
Category leaders can often take 80% of the market share and market valuation, leaving everyone else fighting for the remaining 20%.
Achieving success up in a well-defined market is hard — as market leaders often take all.
Category leaders are everywhere. They stand out.
They lead in market share, usage and/or revenue.
(And the followers—less so.)
Ride sharing: Uber
(vs Lyft)
Online search: Google
(vs Bing)
Microblogging: Twitter
(vs Tumblr)
Social media: Facebook
(vs Instagram, SnapChat)
Productivity software: Office 365
(vs Google G Suite)
File storage: Dropbox
(vs Box, OneDrive)
Cloud services: AWS
(vs Azure, Google Cloud Platform)
Customer relationship management: SalesForce
(vs Dynamics 365)
Tablets: iPad
(vs Android tablets)
Become the category leader.
Start by creating your own category.
The key category strategy process steps and deliveables include —
Interviews & Prework
Gather background on the problem.
Category Name
Define the "container" for the problem.
Reflects market type, nature of the problem, audience who has the problem.
Point of View
POV identifies the problem.
Explains ramifications of not solving the problem.
Declares your unique answer to the problem.
Describes solution, vision for the future.
Marchitecture &
Ecosystem
Create visuals for external roadmaps— "marchitecture" and partner ecosystem.
Update your product taxonomy to reflect the new category.
Then, get your company on board, and launch your category the industry.
Internal Launch
Get the entire company on board to solve the problem.
Brings everyone together across the company, product and category strategy.
Industry Launch
Plan to launch your new category to the world.
Build your category marketing plan to complement your product marketing.
Rolling Thunder
Launch numerous planned initiatives to transform the market to understand your category.
Drive the momentum across your ecosystem with every event, further accelerating the category flywheel.