The best position in any market is the one nobody else can hold. Not a stronger position on the same board. A board you drew yourself.
Compete inside an existing category and you accept its terms. The buyer already knows the reference prices, the standard feature list, the incumbent everyone measures against. Your job shrinks to arguing that you are a slightly better version of a thing people already understand. That is a fight on the incumbent’s ground, decided by their scoreboard, and the incumbent has more salespeople than you.
Define a category and the maths inverts. You name the problem. You decide what the old way was, and you get to call it the old way. You set the criteria the buyer uses to judge everyone, including you, which is a useful thing to control.
The research that made this idea famous belongs to Play Bigger, the firm behind the 2016 book of the same name. Their own analysis put a number on it: Category Kings soak up 76% of the market cap of the entire category, leaving competitors fighting over the remaining 24%. Their Harvard Business Review piece, How Unicorns Grow, found that most value creation among high-growth tech companies came from these category kings, the firms that carved out winner-take-all space rather than scrapping for a share of someone else’s.
Treat that 76% with a raised eyebrow. It is Play Bigger’s own figure, drawn from a sample of tech winners, and a firm that sells category design as a service has every reason to make category design look inevitable. Survivorship is doing quiet work in the background. But the direction is right, and you can feel it without the statistic. The company that frames the category tends to lead it, because it wrote the rules everyone else now has to answer.
So far, so seductive. Here is where it goes wrong.
Walk any B2B conference floor and count the companies announcing a category. “Revenue intelligence.” “Conversational marketing.” “The modern data experience.” Most of them have not created anything. They have taken a product the market already understands and bolted a fresh adjective to the front of it.
This is not positioning. It is fog. You have asked the buyer to learn a new phrase before they can grasp what you sell, and the phrase does not pay them back for the effort. They still file you under the old category in their head. They just now suspect you of marketing at them.
A real category answers a question the buyer was already asking and could not name. A fake one answers a question only the vendor cares about. The test is not whether the phrase sounds new. It is whether a customer would use it, unprompted, to describe their own problem to a colleague.
Almost none pass.
April Dunford wrote the book on positioning, Obviously Awesome, and she is blunt about the hype. “I don’t believe that companies create categories,” she has said. “I believe that categories emerge, and some companies are wise to that.”
Her point lands because it is uncomfortable. To create a category you have to sell two things at once: that the problem exists, and that you are the answer to it. That is double the work for the same conversion, and you are paying to educate a market your competitors will inherit. Dunford notes that history is unkind to pioneers. Google did not invent search. Facebook did not invent the social network. Both walked in after someone else had done the expensive job of teaching the world it wanted the thing.
Her count is worth sitting with: roughly 90% of recently public tech companies positioned themselves inside existing markets rather than inventing one. The glamorous move is rare among winners, not common.
Naming a new category is cheap. Getting a market to adopt your name for its own problem costs more than most companies will ever spend, and you pay it before anyone is paying you.
I think both things are true, and the reconciliation is the whole game. Category creation is the highest-return positioning move available and the one most likely to burn two years and a marketing budget. The difference is not ambition. It is whether the category was already forming without you.
Category design works when the problem is genuinely new, or newly acute, and the market has no good word for it. It works when the old alternative is not a rival product but a behaviour: a spreadsheet, a manual process, a thing people tolerate because they never framed it as a problem. Salesforce did not out-feature Siebel first. It framed on-premise software itself as the enemy and called the alternative “the end of software.” The incumbent could not answer that without conceding the frame.
It works when you can afford the education. Category creation is a capital expense with a long payback. If you cannot fund years of patiently teaching the market a new way to see its own situation, you are not creating a category, you are announcing one and hoping.
And it works when you already have the goods. Eddie Yoon, who has written more on this for HBR than anyone, draws a hard line between a first mover and a category creator. Being early is not the same as being the one who defines the space and then delivers on it. Keurig did not simply arrive first at single-serve coffee. It built the machines and the pods, locked down distribution, and only then owned the category it had taught households to want.
If you decide the category is real, the job is not a launch. It is a campaign measured in years.
You define the language, precisely, and you repeat it long past the point of your own boredom. You are trying to install a phrase in the buyer’s mouth, and installation is slow.
You frame the old alternative without insulting the people still using it. The enemy is the status quo, not the customer who lives in it.
And you produce evidence without stopping, because a new category has no reference case and the buyer’s instinct is to distrust the unfamiliar. Analyst coverage the buyer can point to. A number they can defend to their boss. You are de-risking a decision nobody has made before.
None of this is a positioning statement. It is closer to teaching, and most companies quit teaching the moment their own team gets bored of the lesson, which is roughly four years before the market has finished learning it.
Before you claim a category, run the cheaper experiment. Position sharply inside one that already exists. Nail what Dunford calls the competitive alternative, the thing your buyer would genuinely do instead of buying you, and make your value obvious against it. If you cannot win a fight the buyer already understands, a new one you have to explain will not rescue you.
The category is not a slogan you get to keep. It is a debt the market lets you carry, and only for as long as you keep paying it down.
The best work starts with a conversation, and a decision worth making.
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