The Big Brand Lie: How Categories Make Brands & Why Brand Marketers Never Believe It

Have you ever met someone who’s been drafted into a cult?

Category Pirates—Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole—see a meaningful percentage of marketers, entrepreneurs, and executives trapped in what they like to call, “The Brand Cult.” These are professionals who have been taught the best (aka: “the most well known”) brand wins.

And this is a lie.

The biggest brands in the world didn’t become successful because of their brand. They became successful by creating and dominating a new and differentiated category, of which their brand became synonymous. But move that company’s brand into any other category (in which they have no leadership position) and the brand becomes worthless. Ralph Lauren. Microsoft. Red Bull. Even Google, all launched products in adjacent categories where they had no category ownership, and ended up wasting millions (or, in some cases, billions) of dollars.

Because categories make brands.

Not the other way around.

In this “mini-book” you will learn:

• How “The Brand Cult” began, and what branding actually means (it’s not good).
• Why brand marketing never works, and how much money big brands waste per year racking up meaningless metrics like impressions.
• Why brand extension never works—and how Disney+ is setting a standard brand marketers everywhere are copying, not realizing the mistake they are making in the process.
• Your role as a CMO, and why it is the CMO’s job to evangelize the category—not the company’s brand.
• The role branding should play in category design.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this exposes everything that’s wrong with brand marketing—and what you should do instead.