A Marketer's Guide to Category Design

How to Escape the "Better" Trap, Dam the Demand, and Launch a Lightning Strike Strategy

By: Category Pirates, Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, Nicolas Cole

Narrated by: Jason DeFillippo

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 three times CMO, Pirate Eddie has driven over eight billion dollars in annual sales generated for companies, and Pirate Cole is a serial writing entrepreneur. 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" (falsly 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 percent 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 and 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, entrepreneur, or an executive who wants to approach marketing through a category lens, this is the book for you.

©2021 Category Pirates (P)2023 Category Pirates

Supplement to The Category Design Toolkit

Another good installment by Category Pirates. The overarching message is the same - to create a category of one - with ideas broken down through different angles.