What is category design
Category design creates and names a new market, then teaches buyers to want it. It is not competing for share in a market that already exists. Play Bigger describes it as designing the category, the product and the company together. It is a harder bet than positioning in a frame buyers already know.
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The definition
Play Bigger calls category design the discipline of creating, naming and dominating new markets. The work starts with a problem buyers do not already have a budget line for, then a category name, a point of view and a company lined up behind that problem. Their book, by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney, makes the same case: winning by designing the market, not only by beating rivals inside one. Their site also says that in the dominate phase a category king controls roughly 76% of the category’s economics. That figure is their claim.
How it differs from positioning
Positioning chooses the frame that makes your value obvious. One option is a new category. Dunford calls creating a new market category the most difficult style of positioning, because you have to teach buyers the frame before the value can land. The other styles use a market they already understand, head to head or as a slice you can own.
Category design and ordinary positioning
| Question | Category design | Positioning in a known market |
|---|---|---|
| The bet | Buyers will learn a new market | Buyers already have a place to put you |
| The cost | Years of teaching the problem | A clearer claim inside a frame they know |
| The failure mode | A name nobody searches for | Looking like every other vendor in the category |
| A startup default | Rarely | Usually |
FAQs
Should a seed startup design a category?
Usually no. You would be spending scarce time teaching a market before you can sell. Start in a frame buyers already understand.
Is a subcategory the same thing?
No. A subcategory borrows a known market and adds a qualifier. Category design aims to create the market.
Is category design the same as positioning?
Positioning is the choice of frame. Category design is one style of that choice, and the hardest one.