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. But are you building your business? More importantly, are any of these efforts going to compound over time and establish you as the category leader?
Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole—otherwise known as the Category Pirates—are the authorities of Category Creation and Category Design in the digital world. Pirate Christopher is a 3x CMO, Pirate Eddie has driven over $8 billion in annual sales generated for companies, and Pirate Cole is a serial writing entrepreneur, and together they have put together A Marketer's Guide To Category Design.
In this book, you will learn:
- There is a new category of "human" in today's world: Native Digitals (people under the age of 35 years old). And if you are a Native Analog, then all of your marketing efforts need to sit in this new context called, "For Native Digitals, the digital world is the real world."
- Why so many marketers, entrepreneurs, executives, and even investors fall for The Big Brand Lie (falsely believing it's the company's "brand" customers care about).
- The "Better" Trap: why comparison marketing never works and causes comparison-focused companies to fight over only 24% of the market.
- How to successfully execute a Dam The Demand strategy, stopping customers in the "old" world and moving them over to the new & different future you are creating.
- How to launch a Lightning Strike Strategy—and why "Peanut Butter Marketing" (spread out evenly throughout the year) is a guaranteed path to irrelevancy.
- What most marketers don't understand about Black Friday, and why discount campaigns and coupons are a bad way to grow your business.
- And finally, the difference between content marketing that captures people's attention and makes a difference versus content that goes nowhere.
If you are a marketer or an entrepreneur/executive who wants to approach marketing through a category lens, this is the book for you.