Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

Once people have chosen a king, they will always tend to believe the king is better, even if it’s not. This reality explains why companies with superior technology can still lose category wars. Once a king emerges customers believe it’s the best, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

“History shows that the first brand into the brain gets twice the long-term market share of the No. 2 brand and twice again as much as the No. 3 brand,”

than to know that someone who isn’t yet born

a category-based strategy requires the design of a great product, a great company, and a great category at roughly the same time.

Conventional wisdom says Google won simply because it built a better search engine. But it won because it also designed a new category and designed its company to fit that category. So

There is zero correlation between the amount of money raised by a company before it goes public and its post-IPO value creation. The only

You have to help them move from the way they used to think, to a new frame of reference.

Category design is also not just marketing. Category design is a company-wide strategy.

Your product, your company culture, your marketing—everything has to be aligned with transforming the way potential customers think. If you change the way they think, they will change their buying behavior. More important, if you are the company that changes the way people think, people will see your company as the category king, and you will win t