3.3
Category Design
The strategy of creating and naming a new market category rather than competing inside an existing one, on the premise that whoever defines a category captures most of its value.
Ramadan, Peterson, Lochhead & Maney (2016)
What it does
Argues the best positioning is not taking a slot in an existing category but creating the category and setting its terms, on the claim that the “category king” takes most of the value.
When it breaks
Heavy survivorship bias. The often-quoted 76% of category market cap comes from the authors' own unpublished analysis with no disclosed sample, method or period — and the companies that tried to create a category and failed are not in the book.
Case
Play Bigger's central claim is that the category king captures 76% of its category's market capitalisation, illustrated by Salesforce creating and owning cloud CRM. Publish it as the authors' claim, not as an established finding.
Marketing Journal — Play Bigger interview ↗Diagram — not yet drawn
Two timelines: the visible one where a king emerges, and beneath it the invisible one of category attempts that died — the survivorship the framework hides.
In the wild
Unvetted · not part of the tier assessment
What has been written about this tool in the last twelve months. Machine-retrieved and unchecked — everything above this line was checked.
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