Our new book, The Category Creation Formula: Discover, Design, and Win New Market Categories, comes out February 24, published by HarperBusiness. The book’s website is here – where you can pre-order a copy and download both the Introduction and first chapter.
Here is the Introduction, written by Kevin, which explains the book’s genesis. (The rest of the book is by Kevin and Mike.)
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Introduction
In 2014, I began working on a book with Al Ramadan, Christopher Lochhead and Dave Peterson – a book we ultimately ended up calling Play Bigger.
When we started, we had a bunch of compelling but disparate and often-unconnected ideas around creating new market categories – a “bag of doorknobs,” to reference a phrase from the book. But as we worked through the ideas and wrote some of the early chapters, we all felt like we were fitting together the pieces of a new business discipline.
Months into our work, the four of us gathered at Chris’ house in Santa Cruz, Calif., which had become our book-writing headquarters. I laid out printouts and Post-Its of concepts and chapter headings on Chris’ enormous dining room table, lining them up like a storyboard. Al stared at the papers and Post-Its and said this all reminded him of when he was a leader at Macromedia and the company created the discipline of “experience design.”
After a silence, someone – Al and Chris credit me, though I don’t actually remember, so who knows – said something like, “Holy shit! It’s category design!”
I think all four of us got goosebumps. That was what we were creating. Category design would be a new discipline that would help companies identify, define, develop and ultimately win new market categories. The key to doing all of that would be to intentionally design the category – design it in a way that would put a company in the driver’s seat of the category. And our book was going to lay out how to do that, step by step.
Play Bigger came out in the summer of 2016. We thought we had produced something terrific, but you never know if a book is going to catch the zeitgeist. Sales started out small but steady, and then just kept going and going. Venture capitalists were handing the book out to portfolio CEOs. Founders read it and told other founders they had to read it. Marketers caught on and began changing their titles to “category designer.” And companies wanted us to help them do what we wrote about.
By the end of 2016, with a nudge from Chris, Al and Dave, I’d formed Category Design Advisors with Mike Damphousse, who had known and worked with Play Bigger’s other co-authors longer than I had. From then until this writing, Mike and I worked on category design projects for nearly fifty companies, and guided workshops for dozens more at incubators and VC portfolio gatherings. We led category design projects all over the world, through up and down economic cycles, and through a pandemic. We’re working on category design today as new generations of artificial intelligence open up ways to create new market categories in every corner of business and life.
Through all of that, as Mike and I put category design concepts into practice, we learned a ton. While most of Play Bigger was prescient and on target, we learned that there is much more to category design than we covered in that book.
Some of what we’ve since developed expands on the theoretical ideas behind category design. Some of it enhances the discipline’s hands-on, practical aspects. We’ve learned that there are better ways to do some of the things in the book, like how to write a category Point of View (POV), and how to roll out a category and make it stick. We developed a model for doing category design in a condensed sprint.
All of that, we feel, moves up the discipline to a higher plane. We now call what we do “strategic category design.”
This book is about what we’ve learned and how you, too, can practice and benefit from strategic category design. Yes, we’re giving away our institutional knowledge. (Well, sort of – you’ll probably have to pay for the book.) We believe this is bigger than us. By open-sourcing the details and secrets of strategic category design, many more companies, organizations and individuals can benefit from it than we could ever touch as a firm. If the contents of this book help make some of them stronger, better, more meaningful and more enduring, we all win.
Pre-order the book and download the first chapter here.
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Can’t wait until the book comes out and want to talk about your category? You can book office hours with us here.