STRAATEGY_SCRAAPS v180

Many new ventures succeed because their founders see a new way to segment and target an existing market, often in behavioural terms. Doing so enables the entrepreneurial venture to target a behaviourally defined segment with benefits suited uniquely to that segment, benefits not offered by existing solutions.

The magic combination of Category Design is both Naming & Claiming the future (where you are going), as well as the past (“you don’t want that old thing, do you?”).

Those similar scenarios are possible when positioning presents you with that opportunity. So the initial pattern presented itself because I was working with a very specific, identifiable subgroup of clients (marketing firms, privately owned, smallish, run by a deeply involved principal) because my positioning delivered repeating scenarios.

What is our category not? What things would you never really associate with the stuff that you and your competitors (or true competitors…) do? It shouldn’t be too hard to come up with some stuff, because most categories are deeply entrenched in predictable norms, leaving a lot of territories totally unexplored.

So, how do you create a category? Categories are created at unlikely intersections, spotted by writers with an intimate understanding of one or multiple sub-categories.