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The key to each has to do with creating, developing, and dominating new categories of products and services.
Greg Raymer. He bounced around the Midwest while growing up, got a master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota, graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1992, then worked as a patent attorney for Pfizer. He’d played lots of poker in college—“we
remember
Thirty-five years ago, at the height of the TV age, two marketing experts published Positioning—about maneuvering a product to the top of an existing market.1 In 1991, as the microprocessor brought computing to the masses, another book, Crossing the Chasm, focused on the marketing challenges of innovation—developing a new product for an existing market.2 In 1997, with the dot-com explosion taking hold, The Innovator’s Dilemma introduced the concept of disruptive innovation—how a radically innovative product
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A great message, a great product, a great innovation—these things are no longer enough on their own.
In that sense, a problem is a category. A company that best frames a problem is the company
that often comes to define and take the category. Put another way: winning companies today market the problem, not just the solution.
Once the public understands the problem, people latch on to the most popular solution.
So people look for ways to make fewer choices in the face of more choices.
The category as an organizing principle is supported by research on the brain and cognitive biases, as described by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, and by a host of brain scientists.8 Our
The data show that the best time for a company to go public is when it is between six and ten years old. Oracle, Cisco, Qualcomm, Google, VMware, and Red Hat are among the many enduring category kings that went public in the sweet spot window.
We found that the age of a company at IPO even mattered more to post-IPO value creation than the amount invested in a company while it was still private.
Your number one job is to change the way people think. Your product, your company culture, your marketing—everything has to be aligned with transforming the way potential customers think. If you change the way they think, they will
“Is there room for a third category of device in the middle?” Jobs said to the audience. He dismissed past efforts to fill that spot, saying they were just bad laptops. But, he said, there had to be a place in our lives for a device that is “so much more intimate than a laptop and so much more capable than a smartphone.” With that, he showed the first iPad. And then Jobs uttered the magic words—the words that showed Apple had thought about this new product in a new way.
Jobs intentionally, willfully, strategically created a new category and put the iPad at the top of it from day one.
Creating the category was Apple’s strategy. Of course, it worked. In the first year,
profitable as it harvested the shit out of Windows and Office.
2000 and bumped along at those lower levels until the new CEO came
Andreessen’s 2011 manifesto, “Why Software Is Eating the World.”
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