Category Design 101: Examples, Frameworks, And Resources
Learn the fundamentals of category design, including examples and essential frameworks you need to design and dominate a category.
Category Pirates
Category Pirates
Category design is a business strategy that helps companies develop and dominate a specific category of products or services. It helps companies synchronize three key aspects: product, company, and category design. But more importantly, it’s the secret to uncontainable, borderline incomprehensible business growth.
The good news?
Category design is not a strategy reserved for billion-dollar companies or high-growth startups.
Some of the most legendary category designers are solopreneurs, small business owners, and consultants. who have niched down, leveled up, and carved out a category of one. As a result, they have no (or little) competition. This means they’re in demand, they set the price status quo, they attract the most loyal customers, and they win the majority market share of the entire category.
And they monetize and monopolize to become the Category King.
Whether you’re new to category design or looking for inspiration, it’s important to know the demand for category designers is growing exponentially. In this guide, we’ll share our crow’s nest view of category design, why it’s important, specific category design examples, and the essential frameworks you need to apply category design.
The definition of category design is simple: It’s about developing a unique point of view that lets you niche down and get more specific about your offering to attract customers, who then evangelize your offering and turn you into the Category King.
But to implement category design, you have to ask hard questions.
These answers are the key to effective category design—and enjoying a life where you have no competition.
What is category design? Category design is the process of developing and dominating a specific category of products or services by synchronizing the Magic Triangle of product, company, and category design. The goal is to become known for a niche you own, build a loyal following of Superconsumers, and dominate the majority of market share, which makes it impossible for someone else to “do what you do.
The term “category design” became part of the mainstream marketing conversation thanks to the 2016 book Play Bigger by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney. The book shares how companies that create new categories of products or services, instead of competing in existing markets, find the most success.
Done effectively, category design erodes the competition.
Category design introduces the world to new ways of living, working, and playing.
Companies that create new categories, or successfully redesign existing categories, are the ones that ultimately change the world. Along the way, they create exponentially more value for both shareholders and the entire market.
Category designers are people and companies that move the world from the way it is, to the way they think it should be.
Think: Airbnb, Uber, Tesla, Netflix, Microsoft, Spanx, Apple, and Google
They do this by solving a problem people didn’t know they had. Or by reimagining a known problem—and then creating the potential for a radically different solution. Most of all, they create (and subsequently capture) the exponential new value generated by an ecosystem of employees, customers, partners, investors, and communities.
But the single greatest benefit of category design: Anyone can do it, at any stage of their life.
Let’s look at examples that highlight the power of category design.
New categories are created, dominated, and neglected every day. Here are a few of our favorite examples of category design:
Keurig is not a cup of coffee from a coffee pot/shop. It's a single-serve coffee maker that brews your own personal cup of coffee, based on the K-Cup flavor you choose.
Between 1997 and 2017, Keurig unlocked billions in value by providing consumers with an amazing bundle of consistency, speed, and variety. But behind that bundle was the amazing observation that in a multi-coffee drinking household or workplace, someone was compromising the ideal type of coffee they really loved. They were shackled by the single pot of coffee.
Keurig gave consumers variety, choice, and agency.
Guess what happened.
JAB Holding Co. acquired Keurig for $13.9 billion in 2015. Today, it’s the Category King of single-cup coffee in the U.S., beating out Starbucks, Dunkin’s, and Folgers.
DoorDash started as a local food delivery service in Palo Alto, California.
Today, it’s an international Category King that operates in more than 7,000 cities across the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan. In 2012, the four co-founders—Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore—realized small business owners struggled with deliveries. After setting up a delivery service catering to Stanford students, they began convincing restaurants to try the service.
The company’s key to becoming a Category King?
Moore summarized it perfectly on Twitter, “We were able to be far more efficient than our competitors even before our series A, just from smartly solving for an on-demand model with three sides.”
The three sides: delighting customers, merchants, and drivers.
DoorDash now commands over 60% of the U.S. food-delivery market share. It’s closest competitors? UberEats at 31%, and GrubHub at 9%.
Tesla is not just a car manufacturer—it’s a sustainable energy company.
Tesla began by building zero-emission vehicles. And its mission, accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy, is apparent in every product it designs.
Tesla’s products not only fit the company’s mission—but they also fit a specific sustainable energy need.
That’s why the company promotes “electric vehicles” and, more broadly, “sustainable energy” (the category) over Tesla the “brand.” Like all category designers, the company and product do not fit into old boxes. They are new. They are different. They cannot be compared to what came before.
Once you go Tesla, you don’t go back.
Every Category King relies on core category design frameworks to design and dominate its niche.
If you don’t implement these frameworks, no amount of product-tweaking, business-model-banging, or million-dollar-marketing will make a difference.
So here’s how each one works.
The Magic Triangle is the combination of product design, company design, and category design—each side with equal importance, ideally executed at the same time.
If you successfully prosecute all three sides of The Magic Triangle, you will unlock a company’s most valuable asset: your data flywheel.
Data flywheels are a way to anticipate the direction of future headwinds and tailwinds.
The data in your flywheel is the culmination of insights you capture from your category, customers, competition, and your opportunistic lens on how to best use those insights to expand your category, create a new category, and/or partner with other companies.
And once you start capturing data, your flywheel goes round and round.
When entrepreneurs successfully prosecute the Magic Triangle and Data Flywheel, they change the world.
But changing the world means changing how people think.
Languaging is the strategic use of language to create distinctions between old and new, same and different. And it involves Framing, Naming, and Claiming all of the following:
Languaging is an essential component of category design because if you can’t write about what you’re thinking, then you aren’t thinking clearly. And if you aren’t thinking clearly, then how are you going to change the way the reader, customer, consumer, or user thinks?
You won’t.
Here’s how Category Designers have used Languaging to change people’s perceptions.
If done well, Languaging has the potential to reflect the unspoken qualities of your category point of view.
Unique POVs move the world from the way it is to a new, different way of doing things.
In order to change the world and unlock exponential breakthroughs, you must use category design to reject the premise with a unique POV.
When Languaging is executed successfully, and is reflective of a well-defined POV of the category, two things happen. First, you become known for the new language you’ve invented. And then, customers don’t see you as “better.” They see you as different.
Legendary POVs have a simple architecture.
Most importantly, the company that evangelizes the POV is immediately viewed as the leader.
But to become (and stay) the Category King, you need to apply the 8 category levers.
There are 8 very clear category levers you can push and pull to create massive differentiation.
The goal is to achieve radical differentiation by implementing category design thinking on a 360-degree level. Within each one of these levers, we encourage you to apply the Category Design Scorecard to evaluate how well you are scoring in all 5 areas of the scorecard for that particular lever.
The more levers you push and pull, the further you distance yourself from any and all competition.
Because you don’t do what they do. You’re different. You’ve forced a choice.
So there is no comparison.
Annual marketing planning is usually about as fun and productive as getting hit with a hockey puck in the privates.
A major problem with marketing plans is most of them start with last year’s plan as the template. But legendary plans are about creating a different future, not continuing the past. To create a legendary marketing strategy, you need a Lightning Strike.
Every Lighting Strike has 3 pillars: Information Wars, Air Wars, and Ground Wars
The goal is to make it feel as though your company has “taken over” for a small window of time.
This requires you to invest 70% of your total budget on 2-4 Lightning Strikes per year. But a Lightning Strike is not an effort to try to market to “everybody.” You need to create the Comic-Con for your category—physically, virtually, whatever that means to you (and your Superconsumers).
The logic here is that it’s better to matter to your Superconsumers 2x per year for two days than to not-matter to everybody, forever.
How do you know when you’re looking at a category creator versus just another high-growth company fighting for market share in an existing category?
The Category Design Scorecard will tell you.
We created this scorecard after reviewing companies from the Fortune 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list and analyzing their 10Ks, Annual Reports, Investor Presentations, and Investor Relations websites. Companies were scored in five key areas on a 0 to 2 scale: 0 being the company does not successfully accomplish each area’s goal, 1 being the company partially accomplishes the goal, and 2 being the company successfully accomplishes the goal.
Here’s a quick overview of each area:
After being scored, companies tend to cluster into 3 buckets.
“Be Different” companies care deeply about the category POV/problem and are committed to creating a different future.
As a result, they become exponentially valuable and drive all the “Be The Winner” and “Be The Best” companies either out of business or out of relevance.
Now that you know the benefits of effective category design, let’s dive into the best resources you can use to learn more about it.
Category design is a relatively “new” category of marketing, but we’re beginning to see more interest from marketers, entrepreneurs, creators, executives, and investors who are realizing its power.
There aren’t a ton of resources available to learn the fundamentals of category design. But this blog, and the resources we share below, are a great place to begin.
As category design makes its way to mainstream business strategy, resources are popping up on sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. Here's some inspiration from a few of the greatest category designers to follow on both platforms today.
Christopher Lochhead is a Category Pirate, as well as a 3x CMO, a #1 Apple business podcaster, and a #1 Amazon marketing author. Christopher's first book, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets, has been called “the bible of category design” and is in the top 1% of business books.
You can follow him on Twitter @lochhead and on LinkedIn here.
Eddie Yoon is a Category Pirate and has written more on Category Creation & Design than any person living or dead for The Harvard Business Review. He is the author of the breakthrough bestseller Superconsumers: A Simple, Speedy, and Sustainable Path to Superior Growth. He also runs a think tank and advisory firm on growth strategy, called EddieWouldGrow.
You can follow him on Twitter @eddiewouldgrow and on LinkedIn here.
Nicolas Cole is a Category Pirate, as well as an author, viral writer, ghostwriter, serial entrepreneur, and one of the most-read writers on the Internet. He is the co-creator of the largest cohort-based writing course online, Ship 30 for 30, as well as the author of the best-selling book, The Art & Business of Online Writing. To date, his work has accumulated over half a billion views.
You can follow him on Twitter @nicolascole77 or on LinkedIn here.
A number of legendary Category Designers team up at Play Bigger to help companies solve category problems and create a unique point of view. Follow anyone on the team to discover how to dominate a category. Currently, this includes:
Category Design Advisors is led by co-founders Kevin Maney, co-author of Play Bigger, and Mike Damphousse—a veteran CEO and category designer. The CDA’s Resources page is packed with videos, blog posts, and books to help companies develop a strategy and a methodology to create a new category of business. The team currently includes:
John is the founder of Flag and Frontier, a consultancy and resource hub that helps executives in B2B tech pursue category design. Visit the company’s website for blog posts on the fundamentals of category design, or follow John on LinkedIn where he writes about web3, B2B marketing, category design, and marketing strategy.
The greatest entrepreneurs, executives, investors, creators, and even writers and artists apply category design to become Category Kings.
They don’t market themselves or their brand. They market the new category of “thing” they are creating in the world. They reject the premise. They imagine what’s possible.
And they create a different future.
By walking you through these fundamental principles of category design, our hope is that you’re ready to chart your own course and become a Category Designer. Because category design is how exponential net-new value gets created. It’s where it all begins.
And your success comes down to your ability to educate, evangelize, market, and ultimately monetize the category.