By Samuel Thimothy, VP at OneIMS.com, an inbound marketing agency, and co-founder of Clickx.io, the digital marketing intelligence platform.
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New categories aren’t created by accident. They appear when an entrepreneur identifies a problem and then comes up with a way to solve it unlike anyone else.
By identifying the disease and providing the cure, you create a barrier against the competition that is virtually impossible to break. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds.
It takes more than a revolutionary product or an intriguing tagline to create a category. From product development to sales strategy to executive content and marketing, you need a powerful, consistent vision at the core of your business and complete buy-in from your entire organization.
Why would someone put themselves on the line like this? The answer is very simple. Because when it works, it makes you invincible:
• By creating and reinforcing the impression that you’re an expert in this new trend, it helps build your personal brand.
• By forcing you to prioritize, allocate resources and be ruthlessly efficient with your go-to-market activities, it helps you increase your internal focus.
• By establishing a framework for your customers to think outside the box and make your competitors respond to your point of view, it helps you accelerate sales.
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Companies that create new categories are valued much higher than those that produce incremental innovations. That’s why they typically enjoy much faster growth.
Creating a new category is hard work.
Category creation is not marketing. It’s a whole different level of commitment and effort. When you create a new category, you’re literally creating a new place to put yourself in people’s minds and a new way for people to realize they have a problem.
Brands can transform their businesses through the creation of a new category, but it requires big ideas and a team of decision-makers — innovators at heart who can go beyond conventional thinking.
Additionally, it may require an investment that exceeds your regular marketing budget. This means a higher degree of risk. And there will inevitably be some new categories that fail or are slow to gain traction.
That’s why it’s important to realistically estimate whether your business has the time and resources necessary to define and brand the new category before going all in.
If you are determined to embark on that journey, here are some insights that might help.
Stay true to your mission.
Don’t try to be something for everyone. Instead, be something for people who want to be a part of that journey. It’s true for both hiring your first employees and looking for investors. You need people who believe in the mission, believe in you and buy into your idea of what you think the world is going to look like — people who are also very excited about solving this problem.
Ingrain into something familiar.
One of the biggest difficulties with creating a new category is that it takes a lot of time to convince people that your idea is valid and needed. To help them understand where you are coming from, try to draw some parallels with the thing that already exists and build out from that. It will help people see your vision in the greater context.
Spend a lot of time evangelizing.
In the beginning, this is probably what matters most. Talk to people — investors, customers, employees (both existing and potential) — to spread your idea. But don’t just talk about the product — bring value by focusing on the problem that your product solves. The more evangelizing work you do, the sooner the world will accept your idea.
Don’t worry about the market size.
Here’s one great insight I learned from Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight. When you create a new category, markets aren’t given to you — you create them. And you as an entrepreneur can affect the market and shape it. So take this as your chance to bring your best ideas to the people who you know are going to benefit from your vision, even if they don’t know it yet.
It’s not easy to create a category, but the rewards can be enormous if you succeed. An innovative product strategy begins with a highly differentiated offering that is so different and unique that a new description is needed. So be specific, take ownership and make it grow!
