検索キーワード： 著者 "Christopher Lochhead" すべてのカテゴリー

A mediocre category designer will beat a world-class marketer every day of the week. The reason is because all marketing sits within a context. "He or she who frames the problem owns the solution." Without this context—without a category—your marketing becomes nothing but screaming, shouting, and pitching customers with deals, discounts, and other short-term tactics in the hopes of landing a sale.

Over the past 20 years, category creation and category design has gone from being a little-known "positioning" secret from advertising legends like David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Al Ries, Jack Trout, Gary Halbert, and more, to now becoming the single most in-demand skill among business leaders, Fortune 500 executives, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, marketers, and even the next generation of digital creators.

Some writers don’t want to think about the money side. The question of how to monetize as a writer, creator, and thought leader is a bit loaded—because it requires you to address a deeper question, first.

In 2016, Category Pirate Eddie Yoon wrote the seminal book on business growth, called Superconsumers. A Superconsumer is the kind of person who knows your category better than anyone else—and as a result, is willing to spend 30 percent to 70 percent more with you than other less enthusiastic customers. And in this “mini-book,” the pirates follow up with an equally groundbreaking discovery: A Super of one category is also a Super of nine others.

The content marketing category is a $400 billion industry. And it’s estimated that by 2024, the content marketing industry will grow by another $270 billion, bringing the grand total to nearly $700 billion. But how much of the content being created (especially by enterprise companies and B2C companies) is actually worth reading? The truth is, most of it isn't.

Oprah Winfrey is not a brand. Oprah is a Black woman who was born into poverty in Mississippi to a single teenage mother who used her challenging and troubling childhood to inspire her to create a new category of television talk show that evangelized a more intimate, emotional, and confessional form of media. She did something different.

Category Neglect doesn’t come from people being stupid or lacking sufficient data and resources to spot the headwinds and tailwinds of the future. It comes from a refusal to acknowledge which direction the wind is really blowing.

One of the most common questions entrepreneurs and small business owners ask is, “how do I create a category if I’m not a heavily funded startup, or some massively successful company? How can someone like me create a category of my own?” This reveals maybe the single greatest benefit of category design: anyone can do it, at any stage of their life.

In 1973, Martin Cooper invented the cell phone. How? He started with a problem (the Chicago police needed an alternative to bulky two-way radios). He synchronized the magic triangle (product, company, and category design). He executed a lightning strike (a publicized call to his top competitor). And he won the category.

Almost all thinking is reflexive (having an unconscious “reflex” in response) versus “reflective” (taking a moment to consciously reflect on how the past may have created a preexisting mental model keeping you from considering a new and different future).

This book is for a very small percentage of business people. You see, most people in business are not trying to use Category Design to create a new category that changes the future and generates exponential new value. Instead, many people in business are trying to “not get fired.” Many people want to go to work, make a contribution, and go home.