You can only be as big and successful as your market category.
How to become a category pirate
Featuring: Christopher Lochhead (Author, Former 3x Public Company CMO, Category Design Expert)
12 quotes · 7 insights
Watch Full EpisodeCategory size limits company potential
Lead with their problem, not your solution
No one cares about our product... You know what they care about? Them, their needs, their wants, their problems. And categories are about customers and their wants, needs, problems and opportunities.
Language shapes market perception
New languaging creates new thinking, and a demarcation point in language creates a demarcation point in thinking, which can create a demarcation point in perceived value.
The company that creates the languaging for the category wins.
Build for 10x transformation, not incremental improvement
What most people do is forecasting... What's true is one company wins and everybody else gets fucked. That's what's true.
Positioning shapes everything downstream
The "24%" refers to the typical market share available to non-dominant players, since one company usually captures about 76% of category economics.
What positioning today has become is essentially how do I tell a story about my shit in a unique way... If you're doing positioning in that context, you just decided you're fighting for 24% of the demand designed by somebody else.
Start with the problem, not the solution
Spend more time on the problem than the solution.
Define the game, don't play theirs
You can actually design a market. And in so doing, you create a new distinction in value for people that didn't exist before.
The company that designs the space and gets it to tip at scale... gets a meaningful percentage of the world to agree with their definition of a problem set, which then leads to their definition of a solution set. The company that does that at any kind of scale, wins.
The category makes the product, the category makes the brand, the category makes the company.
Product market fit... Listen to the words, product, market, fit... What you want is you want to design a market category for your product, not fit your product into a market category.
Category designers compete against the status quo... The enemy is the status quo. That is to say the way it is now.