Category Creation

How to Build a Brand that Customers, Employees, and Investors Will Love

Anthony Kennada

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119611561
• eBook ISBN: 9781119611615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Lessons from HubSpot, Salesforce, Gainsight and Other Iconic Brands

"The Uber of this"

"The Salesforce of that"

"It's like Instagram, but for…"

There is no such thing as an original idea anymore – right? Actually, it turns out that the world's most innovative companies have created so much more than just brand new products and technology. They've created entirely new market categories. The challenge is that successfully building new categories requires a perfect storm of luck and timing.

Or does it?Category Creationis the first and only book on the topic written by executives and marketers actively building new categories. It explains how category creation has become the Holy Grail of marketing, and more importantly, how it can be planned and orchestrated. It's not about luck. You can use the same tactics that other category-defining companies have used to delight customers, employees, and investors. There's no better strategy that results in faster growth and higher valuations for the company on top.

Author Anthony Kennada, former Chief Marketing Officer at Gainsight, explains how he led Gainsight in creating the "customer success" category, and shares success stories from fellow category-creators like Salesforce, HubSpot and others. It requires much more than just having the best product. You have to start and grow a conversation that doesn't yet exist, positioning a newly discovered problem in addition to your company and product offerings. The book explains the 7 key principles of category creation, including the importance of creating a community of early adopters who will rally around the problem they all share—especially if someone will lead them.

· Identify the "go" and "no go" signals for category creation in your business

· Activate customers and influencers as brand ambassadors

· Grow a community by investing in live events and experiences

· Prove the impact of category creation investments on growth, customer success, and company culture

Written for entrepreneurs, marketers, and executives from startups to large enterprises, Category Creation is the exclusive playbook for building a category defining brand in the modern economy.

Part I
The Long-Term Greed of Category Creation

1
Category Creation: The Noble Marketing Strategy That Can Spark a Movement

No one ignores phone calls at 9:00 p.m. on a Sunday.

That’s what I thought, anyway, driving up the I-5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The name displayed on the phone (now on its second ring) was Nick Mehta, my former CEO who almost never called—certainly not this late and not this out of the blue. Before the third ring, I played the entire conversation through in my head. Having sold our last company to Symantec, perhaps Nick figured out the next chapter of his career and would offer me an opportunity to join him. Before the fourth ring, I knew I would say yes to this hypothetical job offer should it be extended, even before hello—that’s just the caliber of leader in Nick Mehta.

Looking back, I sure am glad I picked up.

■ ■ ■

Maybe you can relate to my position in that story—getting the phone call for the career opportunity that could, just maybe, change your life. Perhaps as an entrepreneur or executive, you can relate to making the call and closing that dream candidate. From either point of view, something about that moment transcends our professional lives and makes an impression deep within our humanity—the prospect of being part of something great, leaving a dent in the universe, and maybe creating some personal wealth along the way.

The energy behind original ideas is electrifying. You find that you’re spending hours of time (maybe even your free time) infatuated with the problem that you’re looking to solve in the market, researching the competitive landscape, and filling your iPhone Notes app with ideas to bring your concept to life. But the deeper you delve into your research, you begin to make a few observations that are different about this concept relative to others you’ve had in the past:

• There are no (or very few) competitors in the space. That’s ok though, right? You’ve discovered how to solve a complex problem before others have.
• There are no analysts or media covering the space. If you squint your eyes, one of those 2x2 quadrants could make sense for your concept, but doesn’t really paint the full picture of the vision.
• There exists a small and early cohort of people who believe deeply in the idea. Well that’s reassuring—but why isn’t any company paying attention to them in a meaningful way?

Your excitement turns into curiosity as you turn to Google in search of best practices on how to position the company given these nuances. Clearly someone must have done this before! However, your curiosity quickly becomes a moment of panic as you realize that you are floating alone in a vast blue ocean on a pool float—that while there are some examples of companies that have done this before, there is no universally accepted playbook for how to launch your marketing strategy without a market to launch into. My friends, you may be in a position to create a category.

I’m here to say that this book is written for you, and that no, you’re not alone on your journey. As the founding chief marketing officer at Gainsight, I found myself in the exact situation that you’re in right now. My team and I have spoken to (literally) thousands of companies on our journey in building the Customer Success category, and the recurring theme from those conversations is that we are indeed in uncharted territory and are all figuring this out together. There’s comfort in that camaraderie, but I felt that it was important to capture everything that we as an industry have learned to date on paper to help empower the next generation of marketers, founders, and executives to learn from our stories—the good, the bad, and everything in between. The result is the very book that you’re holding right now, the first and only playbook on category creation written by operators for operators.

Category creation has become one of the hottest topics in marketing, and for good reason, as there’s no strategy quite like it that can result in both commanding market leadership for the company on top, and incredible personal fulfillment for customers, employees, and investors who are along for the journey. In a world where private enterprise can often be mischaracterized as an at-all-cost pursuit of profit, category creation seeks to reinforce a belief that companies can both win at business while also being human first. Customers of category creators benefit from a company in the marketplace seeking to help them solve complex problems, get promoted, and self-actualize in their own lives and career journeys. Employees at category creators have a unique opportunity to unleash their creativity in the workplace, participate in an incredible corporate culture, and launch a movement behind a new product or service. Investors of category creators are typically in it for the long game, as the market will reward companies able to create and dominate new categories exponentially more than traditional disruptors.

The playbook I’ve compiled in this book will be primarily influenced by a business-to-business (B2B) perspective; however the tactics and strategies discussed will have broad application in the business-to-consumer (B2C) context as well. One of the main reasons for this approach is a deep belief I have that the B2B and B2C worlds are in fact merging, ushering in a new era for business that’s focused on marketing, selling, and supporting the humans behind the logos that we target—otherwise known as business-to-human (B2H). I’ll go into more detail on B2H in the next chapter and on how brand has moved from a deprioritized expense and distraction from growth in most businesses to becoming the heart of their business strategy.

The good news is that anyone can participate in category creation—even companies that are in their infancy or are in the early innings of bringing a product to market. While developing a 10x product is an incredible advantage (see Slack, Uber, or Airbnb as examples), it’s not a prerequisite. Category creation will typically be a marketing-led exercise focused on an exciting new approach to brand positioning, content marketing, community building, and several other levers that we’ll explore in detail. With that being the case, I wrote this book with two specific audiences in mind:

• Startup Marketers or Founders in High Tech Interested in Creating a Category. Whether or not you live in Silicon Valley, or at least subscribe to the belief that software is eating the world, you can appreciate the unique opportunity for startups to create a better future. You may be a founder or entrepreneur with a “change the world” idea that seems bigger than a single company, but the beginnings of an entirely new industry. You may be a marketer who joined a hot startup and are tasked with building a strategy to articulate your founding team’s vision. This book will help shape your thinking and offer practical strategies that you can leverage to launch your company and product into a brand new market category, rather than disrupt an existing one.
• Enterprise Marketers or Executives Operating in Commoditized Markets. The natural course for products in established markets is toward commoditization. Consider the file sharing industry as an example: if you need to store a file online to send to a friend or colleague, there are currently 285 file storage and sharing vendors (according to G2) available to choose from. That’s a great thing for consumers; however, what’s good for customers is not always good for vendors operating in crowded markets. Marketers or executives tasked with standing out in these industries may consider building, buying, or partnering their way into new product categories to expand their positioning and break away from the noise. Whether category creation is an option for this audience or not, the underlying tactics behind the strategy will give enterprise marketers the tools they need to differentiate their brands in the marketplace by focusing on the humans behind the campaigns they’re driving.

Whichever camp you may be in, or even if you’re someone entirely different who’s interested in learning, the lessons and case studies we’ll explore in this book will radically challenge conventional wisdom on how to win in business by taking the road less traveled. But before we get any further, let’s define what we mean by category creation and set some context on the emerging business practice.

What Is Category Creation?

Category creation is a business strategy that focuses on positioning and evangelizing a brand new problem observed in the marketplace, in addition to the solution for that very problem. The output is an entirely new industry of products and services—distinct and differentiated from anything that had ever come before—with a single “category defining” company positioned as the winner in the new market. Category creation will typically refer to market categories that are aligned to a company’s master brand, but for established companies, there are also cases of creating product categories that are aligned to a specific business unit or product line. Marketing’s job in both cases, which we’ll dive into at a tactical level throughout the book, will be to start and grow a conversation that doesn’t yet exist—a much harder strategy that requires creativity, conviction, and a whole lot of patience.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• About the Author
• Part I The Long-Term Greed of Category Creation
• Part II Seven Principles to Create (and Dominate) a Category
• Part III Proving the Impact of Category Creation on Customers, Investors, and Employees
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• End User License Agreement