Category Creation – Getting to the Product Marketing Promised Land

Every product marketer dreams of their thing generating immediate brand recall and becoming a guaranteed line item in every customer’s budget. But if you’re trying to build a new market or redefine an existing one, it’s not easy to get there. How do you get your customers to think about a problem in a new way, or to want to solve a problem they didn’t even know they had?

 

Category creation is one of the single most impactful and most fun things a product marketer gets to do. To explain why, let me date myself by starting with a quote from the movie Field of Dreams (1989). Kevin Costner is standing in a giant corn field dreaming of baseball, and a voice comes to him and tells him “If you build it, they will come.”

 

That mantra has been adopted by many startup founders and innovators, who often believe that when they launch a new thing, that the product will sell itself. Sometimes, it works, but a lot of the time, it doesn't. Why is that? It’s because it’s not good enough just to create a great product, or a great company. You also need to create the category in which you play.

 

One of the brightest minds on the planet about the topic of category design is Christopher Lochhead, co-author of a brilliant book called Play Bigger - How Pirates, Dreamers and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets. Christopher defines category design as “a discipline focused on creating and monetizing new markets. It’s based on the idea that the company that designs a space is best positioned to dominate it.”

 

Said differently, category creation is all about carving out and occupying the position in your customer's mind where your product plays.

 

I’m fascinated by this idea of category creation. I don’t purport to be an expert on the topic. There are people smarter than me who’ve written great books about it. That said, I have had a few at bats creating categories over the years, including my share of failed attempts, as well as a couple that stuck.

 

I started my career as employee #8 at a pre-Series A startup called Janrain (since acquired by Akamai), where I worked for 6 years and helped coin the term and lead the creation of the Customer Identity and Access Management category, a space which competitors later standardized on and analysts have since adopted. I also spent four and a half years as a product marketer at an infrastructure automation company called Puppet, where I led analyst relations and helped influence the analyst community to rally around the category we defined.

 

I believe category creation is one of the most important achievements a product marketer can have to make your company successful. In this blog post, I’ll walk through a roadmap I’ve used to build category narratives, and share a few case studies and examples of other companies that I think have done this really well.

 

Let’s get into it.

First, let's talk about why category creation is important. Several years ago now, the Harvard Business Review looked at the 100 fastest growing companies of the recession era between 2009-2011. Among the 100, only 13 of those companies accounted for 53% of the overall revenue growth and 73% of the overall market cap growth for the whole lot. Wow!

 

What do those 13 companies have in common, according to HBR? They were all category creators.

 

Again, I think Christopher Lochhead sums up the value the best when he writes:

 

Why Should Product Marketers Be Category Creators?

• Define positioning and messaging for your company and your products to shape market perception and change people’s minds.
• Enable sales teams with the plays, messaging, tools and training they need in order to be confident engaging prospective customers and selling your product.
• Influence go-to-market execution, which includes:
  • reputation and awareness activities like AR, PR and content strategy
  • demand creation programs,
  • customer adoption activities

Name a big change in the world

Next, identify the problem that change creates, the impact on that problem to your customer, and the consequence of not solving it.

This is probably the single most important step in building a category. Companies that frame the problem most persuasively are the ones that define categories and win. They’re the ones that get customers to buy into their vision for solving it.

Next, you want to establish why the status quo won't cut it and why a better way is needed. This helps reinforce the need to explore new ideas and new ways of thinking, while de-positioning the old way and the companies you displace.

Next, describe the ideal state. This is the overarching need created by the problem you identified. It’s the promised land you want to help your customers get to. It’s not a laundry list of your features, nor should you even be talking about yourself here. You want your customers to buy into the importance of solving the problem, and your vision of what the ideal state looks like. And this promised land, by the way – it’s what your customers reach when they achieve value realization with your category.

Last but not least, set the rules. This is where you lay out how customers can get to the promised land. It’s where your differentiation gets inception’ed in the minds of customers, to give you an unfair advantage in the market. When you set the rules, you get to own the category.

Let's take a look at some companies that have done this really well. Now, there are hundreds of examples of companies that have done category creation to the nines in the consumer space. We’re all well aware of how Henry Ford introduced made horse carriages obsolete by introducing a revolutionary new way of transporting people from one place to another, or how Apple (re)defined the smart phone category by bringing together a touch-screen iPod, a mobile phone, and an internet communicator into one device. But I want to share some more unsung examples of category design in the B2B technology space, because it's a little bit closer to home for me.

HubSpot pioneered the concept of Inbound Marketing, a category which they still own and lead more than a decade later. It’s this idea that you pull customers in by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them, in contrast to the outbound, push-driven, spray-and-pray approach marketers traditionally relied on. Since introducing the concept of Inbound Marketing, HubSpot has completed a successful IPO and seen its market cap increase from $300M to more than $31B in the past 10 years.

 

Jumping back in time, almost two decades ago now, companies like Eloqua and Marketo redefined email marketing forever by creating the marketing automation category, and it’s now the standard by which any demand marketer communicates with customers and does their job. This Forrester Wave from 2018, not surprisingly, lists these two category creators out in front of competitors that have cropped up since.

 

Tenable is a security software company which has repositioned itself from vulnerability management to cyber exposure. This is Tenable’s category blueprint for cyber exposure. They talk about the big change in the world affecting security teams, the problem that change creates around this idea of a cyber exposure gap. They establish how organizations have traditionally attempted to close that gap and why they’ve failed. And then they describe the solution -- the promised land of modern cyber exposure and why it’s needed, before setting the rules by laying out what modern cyber exposure requires. Since creating the cyber exposure category, at least one of Tenable’s competitors has attempted to follow suit.

 

 

Both HubSpot and Tenable are great case studies in that you don’t always need a groundbreaking, new to the world product that’s dramatically different than anyone’s ever seen in order to design and own a category -- you can do it through differentiated positioning and a compelling point of view.

Atlassian technically didn’t create the category of continuous delivery, but it has become a leader in the space and commands significant share of voice. Continuous delivery is this idea that, every time a developer commits a code change, teams can rapidly deploy those software changes on-demand whenever the business needs, in an automated and drama-free way, in order to innovate faster and accelerate time to market. This category landing page on Atlassian’s website doesn’t exactly follow the roadmap I talked about earlier, but it’s a wealth of resources on the promised land of continuous delivery, why it matters, how to do it, and what’s required to get there.

 

Both HubSpot and Tenable are great case studies in that you don’t always need a groundbreaking, new to the world product that’s dramatically different than anyone’s ever seen in order to design and own a category – you can do it through differentiated positioning and a compelling point of view.

• Unaided brand recall. If customers can recall your company name from memory when prompted only with the name of your category, you've done good work. It indicates two things -- one, that your customers recognize the category you've defined, and two, they associate your company with it.
• Analyst benchmark reports like Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves. If you've nailed your category narrative and invested the time influencing industry analysts, the market will start taking notice and analysts will begin adopting your POV. While getting a Magic Quadrant or a Wave report for your category isn't the be-all and end-all measure of success, these benchmark reports can be very influential at framing buying requirements and vendor preference in the minds of decision makers.
• Becoming a guaranteed line item in your customer's budget. This is the most important measure of success. When you've successfully defined a category, you've identified a problem customers may not have even known they had, convinced them why change is necessary, bought them in on your vision of the promised land, and influenced their requirements in a way that maps to your differentiation. What's the outcome? Customers can't live without your product.

• Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets, co-authored by Christopher Lochhead, Al Ramadon, Dave Peterson and Kevin Mayney.
• Category Creation: How to Build a Brand That Customers, Employees and Investors Will Love, by Anthony Kennada.
• Check out Andy Raskin's writing on Medium -- he's done a lot of insightful thinking around this topic in addition to dropping good San Francisco restaurant recommendations.

Good luck and have fun out there, category creators!