One of the most exciting things about creating an entirely new market category is also one of the hardest: You have to – get to! – open up a new space in people’s minds that never existed before.

There are a number of different ways to open up that space: ad campaigns, thought leadership, talks at conferences. But there’s one tactic that probably doesn’t get implemented often enough. We call it the “MTV strategy” – shorthand for the concept of influencing your customers’ customers. And the model for that strategy is 45 years old this month.

MTV launched in August 1981 on one cable system in New Jersey, playing its first music video, The Buggles’ song “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Nothing like MTV had existed before. If music artists made videos at all, the videos were thought of as promotional material, not a form of entertainment. Pretty much nobody was asking for a channel that would play non-stop music videos. The space in people’s minds didn’t exist.

More significantly, the category space didn’t exist for MTV’s primary customers, which were the cable TV operators. MTV would wither and die unless it got carried by cable, and most cable companies – overwhelmingly run by an older generation – didn’t understand the MTV concept or believe it would have an audience. 

Frustrated at stalled talks with cable operators, MTV CEO Bob Pittman hired a legend in advertising and image-making, George Lois. In the 1960s, Lois became known for the covers he created for Esquire magazine, including the all-time great cover photo of Muhammad Ali shot through with arrows. Lois’s ads made Tommy Hilfiger famous and Lean Cuisine a household brand. Pittman and Lois cooked up the idea of going around the cable operators to get to their subscribers.

This was the “I want my MTV!” campaign. Some of the commercials started with a voiceover: “If you don’t get MTV where you live, call your cable operator and say…” At that point some rock star would come on and yell, “I want my MTV!” Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Pete Townshend were some of the first. 

It worked. A younger generation saw the ads and instantly got it. Not only did the ads open up a space in their minds, it created a sense of, this has to exist! Legend has it the ad ran on a Thursday night in San Francisco, and in the morning the local cable company called MTV and told them to take the #^%# commercial off the air because they were getting thousands of calls. By the end of the year, MTV was available to at least 80% of U.S. households. The category was solidified, and MTV was its winner.

While MTV’s campaign was one of the most colorful and effective examples of opening up a category by appealing to your customers’ customers, other companies have since used it to great effect.

One of those was Intel in the 1990s, with its “Intel inside” campaign. Computer users didn’t buy Intel chips – computer manufacturers bought Intel chips. And there was no computer chip category in consumers’ heads. Most didn’t even know what a microprocessor was. But Intel wanted to establish the PC chip category in consumers’ minds, with Intel as the version that any sane person would want inside. Of course, the campaign worked spectacularly. By the mid-1990s, Intel was one of the most valuable brands in the world and for a while America’s most valuable company. 

An inescapable version of this strategy today are ads for prescription drugs. The real customers of drug makers are physicians and insurers. They’re the ones who prescribe a drug or approve a drug. If they don’t see a new drug’s category as worthwhile, the drug disappears. To get around that, the drug companies started appealing directly to consumers, who may have no ability to buy the drugs but a lot of ability to demand them from their doctors. 

A lot of drug ads are for a category of drug – or for that matter a category of medical condition – that most of us never thought about. We had no space in our minds for Viagra or Ozempic until drug companies created it. Once they did, consumer demand pulled physicians into the category, too, opening up that space in their minds.

So, for anyone developing a new market category, it’s worth considering how to get your customers’ customers to believe in it and drag your real customers along to your point of view – build a movement.
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Does your category strategy include a movement? Book a time with us and let’s jam on it.