Heads up: this is not a detailed, step-by-step, paint- As you’ll see in a moment, much of the messaging by-numbers guide to building a category. That would you create around your category stems from an require a lot more than the couple thousand words understanding of the problem and the people who we have room for here. My goal is to give you a broad experience it. Get this wrong, and the rest of your overview of what the category design process entails, category design efforts will suffer. Part III: so you can have a better sense of the work involved. If This is why category designers begin by spending time you’re interested in a more specific blueprint, both Play with existing and potential customers to really dig into A 30,000 BIgger and another book called Category Creation: the problem. This quote from Play Bigger says it best: How to Build a Brand that Customers, Employees, and “When you describe the problem better than anyone 9 Foot View Of Investors Will Love , by Anthony Kennada will provide else, people assume you have the best solution.” more specifics. You can think of the category design process as Consider this example, from Terminus’ book, ABM is The Category B2B10. It highlights the problems that can arise when involving four phases: marketing is focused on leads instead of accounts. Design Process 1. Understand your audience and their problem “Marketing research firm Forrester discovered 2. Create a category story and category name that fewer than one percent of all leads turn into WHAT YOU’LL LEARN: 3. Bring your category to life customers. Put that another way: 99% of what you’re doing now doesn’t work. It’s not turning This section will give you a high-level summary 4. Evangelize your category into revenue. Your CEO and CFO are looking at of the four phases of category design, with some marketing and wondering what is going on, and no specific examples of how category designers in B2B 1. Understand your audience and one is sure what to say except that leads are coming SaaS have gone through that process. their problem in, and website clicks are up.” Remember: category design is all about solving a new Without mentioning the solution yet, as a reader, problem, or solving an old problem in a new way. you can quickly see that there’s a major problem Therefore, an understanding of this problem serves that marketers face. And it’s obvious that Terminus as the foundation for everything else you’ll do with spent time understanding how marketers work. This category design. If you understand the problem well, definition of the problem is the perfect foil for the Category designers begin then the products you build and the messaging you category Terminus has been trying to build, called by spending time with create to market it will benefit greatly. More than that, account-based marketing. “ showing the market that you fully understand this There are plenty of ways to better understand your existing and potential problem is crucial to getting your new category off the customers, too. At BombBomb, one of the most helpful customers to really dig ground. exercises we did was a survey of our “best fit” customers into the problem. However, problems don’t exist without people. To (we defined “best fit” as having a high NPS score and ” reach a full understanding of a problem, you have having used our software for more than two years). to understand the people who are experiencing that When we asked these customers a series of simple — Eddie Yoon problem. You have to have a sense of how they describe questions about the problem we help them solve, the that problem, what pain it’s causing them, and what answers we received were tremendously valuable. they are currently doing to solve the problem. You may For example, we initially assumed that our customers even discover that your audience isn’t even aware that used BombBomb’s video messaging software to solve they have a problem. It will be your job to show them. the problem of “needing better results from email”. But after talking to customers, we found that it wasn’t better The Newcomer’s Guide to Category Design 20