• Cast a vision that can excite your customers, When your brand is defining its category story, you Part III: partners, and investors and serve as a north star may decide to pick an “enemy” to help drive contrast for your company strategy between existing categories and the new one you’re A 30,000 As a bonus, if you can show how the world is changing, building. “In the early days of building the “learning Foot View Of and how these changes give rise to the need for your experience platform (LXP)” category, we positioned category, your story will be especially strong. Check ‘learning management systems (LMS)’ as the enemy,” The Category out Andy Raskin’s The Best Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen said Brad Zomick, a B2B marketing advisor and for more on this. previously VP of Marketing at Pathgather and Degreed Design Process (LXP category leaders). Generally, the category story is an internal document “Whereas the LMS was built around the needs of the or presentation that guides your company strategy and person administering the education, the new category serves as a foundation for your external messages. But we built was geared towards the needs of the learner. you can also develop an outward-facing version, too. That contrast created clarity for what our category Check out Gainsight’s guide to customer success as stood for and helped fuel our growth.” an example. “Getting your category story right is going to take time,” Remember that your category story isn’t just about you. Getting your says Anna Schena, Director of Growth Marketing at It’s not a pitch for your particular product or company, Narrative Science. “It is much, much harder than it’s a pitch for the category. One it’s been developed, category story it sounds, and will likely require several rounds of you’ll need to think through the right positioning, “right is going to iteration before it is right.” branding, and messaging to support it. take time, it is For context, Anna is building a category they call data Want to learn about the process we used at BombBomb storytelling. Their category story is based around to create our own category name and category story? I’ll much, much harder the idea turns a company’s data into plain-English share more on the Flag and Frontier newsletter. than it sounds. stories that people can more easily understand, all Category name ” automatically. — Anna Schena A category name is as simple as it sounds: it’s a short Sarah Elkins understands the challenge of creating a phrase that gives the category a reference point. category story as well. “It was very time-consuming for Examples are account-based marketing (Terminus), us,” she told me. “For a company that was very technical cloud-based software (Salesforce), and revenue we had to really focus on business language, and getting intelligence (Gong). people out of the technical weeds. That was hard. But it was worth it. I recommend pushing through the The category name does not need to fully describe what frustration.” the category is all about. Its main job is to point your audience’s thinking in the right direction. It will offer a But very much worth the time spent. I’d always new (and perhaps intriguing, provocative, or polarizing) recommend that people really focus on this step phrase that serves as a conversation starter. Finally, and push through the frustration. This is also where the category name provides consistency when talking buy-in becomes really important as you need people about your new category. Here are a few things to keep to push through this process with you. But it’s worth in mind when coming up with a category name. the investment. As I already mentioned, your category story will serve as the foundation for the remainder of • Avoid a category name that’s so broad that it your category design efforts, and you can’t afford to could apply to a number of different problems get it wrong. and solutions. Similarly, a category name should The Newcomer’s Guide to Category Design 22