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.
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...
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...
Category design helped upstart Sensity Systems redefine itself from an also-ran smart lighting company into a category leader that was acquired in 2016 by Verizon.Sensity started on a category-creation path after serial entrepreneur Hugh Martin took over what was then a tiny company making LED...
While researching the book Play Bigger, my co-authors and I found that category kings are an enormous force. These kings – companies that define a new business category and then develop it and dominate it over time – tend to take three-fourths or more of the profits and market value of the entire...
I wrote the Newsweek article below last year around the time we launched the book. Pay note to the graphic below, how it resonates to people's feelings -- their emotions. That's what category kings do. (Newsweek Excerpt) FORGET DISRUPTION—CREATORS DOMINATE MARKETS NOW. Disruption is so last decade....
We are Category Designers.
We work with leadership teams to help them define, develop and ultimately
dominate a new category of business.