Amid fears of the coronavirus, Zoom video conferencing and Purell hand sanitizer are showing the power of creating and dominating a category, particularly during a crisis time.
The most successful companies in today’s economy identify a new category that the world needs, define that category on...
Jack Welch built his strategy for General Electric on category thinking.
Welch, who died this week at 84, was CEO of GE from 1981 to 2001. The company’s market value was $13 billion when Welch took over, and he grew it to $525 billion before it tailed off after the market dips of 2000 and 2001.
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There are many influences behind why category design works. Economist Paul Geroski's theses behind the category lifecycle demonstrates how a company behind a dominant category becomes the chosen vendor – and wins the category. He goes back to the 1800's when the automobile industry emerged to prove...
Welcome to the first annual Super Bowl Category Designer of the Year Award.
Super Bowl ads are a unique opportunity for a company to tell a mass audience that it’s offering something different and powerful – something we all discover in that moment that we must have.
Too bad almost every advertiser...
There are endless ways to drive home a category-defining message. This is the story of how one company did it with a book and a song.
Inc.com names the book Play Bigger, co-authored by Category Design Advisors' partner Kevin Maney, as one of "24 Books for Anyone Who Wants to Get Ahead in Life."
When I was a kid, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was the highlight of every Thanksgiving morning. It was the same for my kids and now my grandchildren. Unfortunately, the latest news is that the famous giant balloons may not fly this year due to winds. Yet even if that signature element goes...
Earlier this year, we had the privilege of working with The Predictive Index on category design. It’s an awesome example of how an older company can reinvent itself and establish a new market category – in this case, the category “talent optimization.”
The Predictive Index is sixty years old, with...
For more than two decades now, my Category Design Advisors partner Kevin Maney has been writing books that have won fans in the technology industry and influenced the way tech companies work and think.
The latest acknowledgment of that comes from Sequoia Capital, one of the most powerful venture...
The Art & Science of writing a powerful point of view
When we do category design work with companies, the key is to use the process to get the leadership team to make hard strategic decisions, and then get the company – and, eventually, the market – aligned behind that new direction.
In order to...
We are Category Designers.
We work with leadership teams to help them define, develop and ultimately
dominate a new category of business.