A Marketer's Guide To Category Design: How To Escape The "Better" Trap, Dam The Demand, And Launch A Lightning Strike Strategy

You. The category designer.

Google’s brand is only valuable in the context of the category it created and dominated, which is Search.

Other times, new categories are named by what they’re not. Henry Ford called the first car a “horseless carriage.” He used a modifier to remove the existing category’s most valuable asset (there is no horse), raising the question, “Well if there’s no horse, then how does it run?” Ah, now the customer is willing to be educated! They have entered “Th

[Meanwhile, somewhere in New York, an entire floor of mediocrely paid copywriters and designers are hard at work on a very fancy, competition-minded response to the RFP.] When you are responding to an RFP, you’ve already lost. Or, as we wrote about in our previous letter on career

Dam The Demand is not a product-to-product comparison. It is a category vs category debate, and involves telling the truth about the legacy category and using the enemy’s strengths (acknowledged by them and everyone in the category) against them.

Air Wars:

Step 1: Tell the truth about the existing category by placing a differentiating word in front.

You Dam The Demand.

The category makes the product—not the other way around.

Product-First Mindset vs Category-First Mindset