What is category design in marketing?
Answered independently in 5 episodes, by 3 different people. Every line below is verbatim from the transcript, timestamped to the moment it was said.
What the archive says
01Among company design, product design and category design, category is the single point of failure — if there's no market, there's no marketing and nobody to buy the product. source →
02Slapping a legendary brand onto a category you didn't design fails: Red Bull Cola against Coke, Google Plus against Facebook, and the Microsoft Store copying Apple retail are the cautionary examples. source →
03Lululemon shows category design beats product innovation — leggings existed for decades, but naming and evangelizing 'athleisure' made them the category queen despite a mediocre company and founder controversies. source →
What 3 people actually said
And if I'm a Democrat who says defund the police or if I'm a Republican who says I want to outlaw abortion in the country, I take them at their word. Words matter. Words matter and words in marketing and words in category design change the future.
We're talking about marketing. We're talking about life. What's the balance between, you know, when you think about category design and category development?
And so the entire entrepreneurial world, the entire marketing world in my opinion is massively over rotated, massively over invested in branding. And here's the aha. You can take a legendary brand and slap it on a category and fail miserably.
Let me say it that way. Well, that brings up another question. I mean, so have you seen category designers fail then because what I'm here from you is almost like in, if long as you develop the the the triangle that you just said and particularly the category design, which can't fail, then the branding and the advertising with which gets that message out there may be inconsequential to whether it succeeds or not.
And I think people can understand that because of how you just encapsulated it. Thank you. And a core tenant in category design is listen to the words, listen to the words.
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