At the heart of category design is a story – a story we call a Point of View (POV). Stories have been an effective selling technique for ages. Don’t just tell someone, “Here’s this gadget and here’s what it does.” Tell a story that shows the target audience why they need the gadget and how it will solve a problem that will help them work or live better.
When we work on a category design project with a client, one of our most important deliverables is the POV. Each POV is a carefully constructed narrative that first lays out, in detail, the unsolved problem and its ramifications, then introduces the solution (i.e., the category of product or service), and describes how that solution will solve the problem. The POV ends by showing how much better things will be now that the solution is here.
This POV becomes the story the company tells itself about why it exists and why it matters, and informs the story it will tell the world, including customers, analysts, investors, partners and whoever else matters.
As a way to get the POV story out, some clients have made it into a video, which can be highly effective. Here are a few different ways our clients have done that.
In the summer of 2022, we worked with LinkedIn Sales Solutions (LSS) – a billion-dollar business unit inside LinkedIn – landing on a category called “deep sales.”
When we work with a company, it’s typically with its senior leadership team gathered in the room. Once we have a category and POV, that team then needs to get the rest of the company or business unit on board. At a startup where all the employees can fit in a room, that can be accomplished with an all-hands meeting. But a business the size of LSS needed a way to effectively broadcast the message to thousands of employees. The team decided to make a video.
What’s interesting about this video is the decision to feature many of the people in the room – the various members of the leadership team that helped come up with the POV in the first place. That signaled to employees that the POV and category design work wasn’t an edict coming down from just the CEO. Employees in sales, marketing, product and engineering could see that the leader representing them had bought into the POV.
This approach also made the POV video interesting to watch. Instead of one person talking, different people deliver each line throughout. You can feel the cohesion of the group, which signals alignment around this category and story.
New York-based Sprinklr was planning to go public in 2021. The company’s leaders believed they were creating a new, differentiated category of B2B software, but they didn’t have a fully-formed category story to tell. We worked with them and defined a category of “unified CXM,” and wrote a POV story to support the category.
With the IPO date approaching, Sprinklr had an urgent need to communicate the POV to the markets and potential investors. Sprinklr’s CEO, Ragy Thomas, is a charismatic presence, so the company made use of that by putting Ragy in front of a camera by himself.
He didn’t actually read the POV. He ingested the POV and made it his own story, so that he could talk free-form to the camera and tell the story in his own way. The result feels intimate and personal, like Ragy is pulling you aside and taking the time to explain unified CXM and Sprinklr’s role in it. Notice, too, the professional, artistic look and feel of the video.
A few years before CDA worked with LinkedIn and Sprinklr, we engaged with Ripples, a company based in Tel Aviv. Ripples was making a machine that could print photographic-quality images on the foam of a cup of coffee or pint of beer. The machines were internet connected, and could download images or get sent images from an app on a phone. At the time, the company was seen as a maker of these clever machines – a good business, but not yet the business its leaders had in mind.
When Ripples came to us, it had goals of becoming a media company, making the tops of drinks into a new form of media for promotions, advertising or entertainment. Working with CDA, the group came up with a category of “beverage-top media,” or, in a short form, “bev-top media.” A purpose of the POV was to make any bar, restaurant or hotel serving drinks believe that serving a “naked drink” (with no image on top) was a lost opportunity.
To get its POV out to the market, Ripples created an animated version of it, much the way many companies these days make animated explainer videos. It’s an engaging way to present the words vs. just posting a document for people to read.
All in all, videos are a great way to get a category message out to the world. These are three ways to do it. Over time, no doubt category designers will come up with fresh new ways to turn a POV into a video.