The 22 Laws of Category Design

Reflexive thinkers want Obvious content. Reflective thinkers want Non-Obvious content.

Dominating a new category is not necessarily about being the first to market a product. It is about being the first company to have your definition of a problem and, therefore, the solution, tip at scale. For example, Apple did not create the mobile phone category (that accomplishment goes to Motorola). But Apple did redesign the category with a fr

Your first lesson: Everything is the way it is because somebody changed the way it was.

(Sun Microsystems was an early pioneer in the tech industry that contributed an incredible amount of knowledge and had one of the greatest category designing taglines in history: “The network is the computer.” It forced thinking and caused a conversation.)

You have to stand in the future to create a different future. Our friend, Mike Maples Jr., calls this “backcasting.” Legendary builders must stand in the future and pull the present from the current reality to the future of their design. So an important additional job of the builder is to persuade early like-minded people to join a new movement.

An easy exercise to start thinking is understanding whether you are forecasting or backcasting. Take a moment to think about which direction you are facing: Forecasting: standing in the past, looking forward, thinking about the future Backcasting: standing in a different future and living “as if” that different future already exists today This migh

For example, fast fashion has become a problem in recent years. So companies have begun creating “tomorrow’s solution” with responsible manufacturing practices, sustainable materials use, and business models that promote a circular economy.

Translation: One company wins big in each category. But most marketers, entrepreneurs, creators, and investors spend their entire careers competing for only 24 percent of the value opportunity of a given category. They’re not the Category King—and they don’t even know it. As a result, they waste time and effort competing over demand instead of crea

Strategic thinking, in its purest form, is the process of considering “what could be true.” Strategy is the art of the possible. What new mental model would have to be invented for this to work? What if people moved from the way it is, to a new, different way? What if a new outcome (an outcome we haven’t considered before) was possible?