6 Category Design Frameworks Every Category Designer Needs To Know
To master category design and claim your niche, start with these essential category design frameworks.
Category Pirates
Category Pirates
Any entrepreneur, marketer, or creator can carve out a new and different niche by applying the core category design frameworks. These tools help guide your strategic thinking, solidify a unique point of view, make the most of “weird” data, and attract your category’s top consumers.
Companies that successfully apply category design frameworks earn an outsized majority of a category’s market share. But the ones that ignore them? They rarely become Category Kings.
So, let’s jump into the 6 essential frameworks all category designers need.
The Magic Triangle is the combination of product design, company design, and category design.
Each side of the triangle is equally important, working together and balancing each other to exert great force on a company’s success and value. Ideally, you want to execute each side at the same time. This dramatically improve your odds of becoming a Category King or Queen by positioning you to avoid The “Better” Trap (aka, competing for minority market share with a “better” version of what already exists in the world).
For example, Tesla applied each side of The Magic Triangle to become the Category King of electric cars.
If you are successful at prosecuting all three sides of The Magic Triangle, you will unlock your****company’s most valuable asset: your data flywheel.
Data flywheels are how you can anticipate the direction of future headwinds and tailwinds. And once you capture the data, your flywheel goes round and round. And this data accumulation creates an “unfair advantage” for the company.
Languaging is the strategic use of language to change thinking. It changes the way people perceive the thing they’re looking at.
Category Designers deliberately use Languaging to differentiate themselves from any and all competition through word choice, tone, and nuance. They use it to speak to (and speak “like”) the customers they want to attract—especially the Superconsumers of the category. And they use it to further establish their position in the category they are designing or redesigning.
Languaging involves Framing, Naming, and Claiming all of the following:
For example, Keurig uses Languaging to claim its niche as a Category King of coffee.
If done well, Languaging has the potential to reflect the unspoken qualities of your category point of view.
A Superconsumer is the kind of person who knows your category better than anyone else—and is willing to spend 30% to 70% more with you.
Superconsumers (and the data associated with them) are essential to unlocking exponential growth for your business. When you gather and leverage this information through a data flywheel, you can forecast the future of the category. How?
By using Category Science.
One of our own at Category Pirates, Pirate Eddie, is a Category Scientist.
And what Eddie does is analyze data and look for things in the past that help him discover how to CREATE a DIFFERENT future (and not: a future that is a continuation of the past). For example, in his book Superconsumers he tells the story of his work with Swingline and the discovery of the “stapler Superconsumer.” As a “consultant,” he dove into Swingline stapler data using a forward-looking lens. And what the data revealed was that a small fraction of consumers drove nearly 80% of the category revenue. It wasn’t just how they spent their money that was an outlier data point, but how they spent their time.
Specifically, they would routinely shop office supply retailers 4-6 times per month.
Pirate Eddie shared this weird data and his weirder hypothesis with Jeff Ackerberg, the President of Swingline.
They immediately shifted their marketing budget to in store activation tailored to this “stapler Superconsumer.” Nine months after the changes were implemented, total stapler category sales went up 19% and higher margin heavy duty and electric stapler sales doubled. Category Science revealed an opportunity to CREATE a different future.
And a new category as a result.
To use Category Science to find your Supers, use these 7 questions to help reveal your Superconsumers.
When designing a category, there are 8 levers you can push and pull to implement category design thinking on a 360-degree level.
Understanding each lever requires a mini-masterclass in category design differentiation. But you can dive into more detail about each category design lever here.
A Lightning Strike is a way to align and synchronize your marketing efforts.
It does not start with last year’s plan as the template. And it is not an effort to try to market to “everybody.” Your goal should be to create the Comic-Con for your category — whatever that means to you (and for your Superconsumers).
To execute your own Lightning Strike, you’ll have to cover the main pillars.
Tesla executes Lightning Strikes terrifically with their Tesla AI Day, Autonomous Day, and Battery Day events, which are primarily held in service of attracting more Superconsumers.
When you’re ready to create a massive amount of buzz, dive into our post on executing a Lighting Strike for detailed tactics and examples.
The Content Pyramid shows the five levels to becoming a legendary writer, creator, or “thought leader” in your field.
Unfortunately, most people struggle to make it past Levels 2 or 3 on The Content Pyramid.
That’s because getting to Level 4 means becoming a Non-Obvious Connectors. These are writers, creators, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders who change the world with their thinking. Here are some Non-Obvious Connectors you may recognize:
Both Obvious Connectors and Non-Obvious Connectors can achieve the top of the pyramid, Level 5. This is even true for curators (like Ryan Holiday). But to make it to Level 5, you need to know exactly who you’re creating for (and who you’re not for).
And that’s because the highest level of creation is category creation—becoming known for a niche you own.