Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Builds on the concept of Positioning for the current business landscape. The authors refer to it as Category Design, a process of finding a niche and establishing the company as a “category king” through a series of well planned and executed steps.
Book Highlights
Category design as a strategy and discipline
- Disruption is a by-product, not a goal
- When a category king appears on the scene, money competes to invest in it leading to high valuations
- Grow fast or die slow – McKinsey
- Category design = great product (UX) + great company (culture) + great category (positioning)
- The fist inventor is an innovator to be thanked. The first to define and develop a category is a leader to be followed
- A company that first frames the problem is the one that often defines the category and wins it (if executed well)
- Market the problem, not just the solution
- [[Psychology]] that works in favor of Category Design
- [[Anchoring Effect]] – is a cognitive bias where a human tends to rely heavily on an initial piece of information that was received to make decisions later
- [[Choice Supportive Bias]] or post-purchase rationalization that retroactively ascribes positive attributes to decisions already made. A tendency to remember our choices as better than they actually are
- [[Groupthink Bias]] is a tendency to believe things because others do
- The Evolution of new markets
- Early phase: Lots of companies competing for attention in a new category
- Middle phase: Category king emerges
- Last phase: Other companies fall way and the winner continues to dominate
- 6-10 law
- The time taken for a company that define and dominate a category to go public
- This corresponds to the “sweet spot” in the evolution of markets graph
- The 6-10 year time period it takes for the audience to shift their thinking and then change their buying behaviour
- This could also correspond to the “Crossing the Chasm” defined by Geoffrey Moore when the product gets mass adoption
- The no 1 job of a CEO is to change the way people think. [Side note: Not sure if people change. We are simply redefining their worldviews.]
- Expensive to change
- When do people change or alter their worldviews
- Category design about making a powerful and provocative [[Story]] that causes users to make a choice. It takes people on a journey
- 4. Buyer’s Journey
- Story (Focus) = P’s (internal) issue + theme (human nature) + plot (events)
- If you’re using a model you’ve seen elsewhere, you’re following
- CEO or someone equivalent should drive this exercise
Category Discovery
- 3 Q’s
- Can you explain like a 5 year old what problem you’re trying to solve
- If you solve this problem perfectly, what category are you in
- If you win 85% of the category, what’s the size of your potential category
- Process of category designs starts with looking for critical insights – conversations and whiteboarding sessions and interviews
- An insight by itself isn’t worth much. It has to lead to discovering a category that fits with the company and product you can build
- Best insights come from observing something that is “missing” in the world
- Look up Floodgate early stage investment firm for thinking about new insights in the tech space
- Two types of insights
- Market insights – something “missing” in the world at large that technology (?) can solve
- Tech insights – come from a scientist or a engineer about technology
- Questions to start the insights discovery
- Vision/mission – original market or technology insight that led you to start the company
- Customers – who do you envision buying this product or service
- Problem statement – what’s the problem you think can solve
- Use cases – What are the specific ways people will use this product or service to solve their problem
- Product/Solution – detailed explanation of the solution, what does it do now and what else is it capable of doing
- Ecosystem – Other companies involved in solving the problem or adding additional value
- Competition – Who else is trying to solve the problem
- Business model – How will your service change business for your customers
- Sales and go-to market – How is the solution sold and marketed
- Organization structure
- Funding strategy
- Look outside the company also for insights
- What categories exist already
- Who is good and who sucks
- Who are the thought leaders, bloggers, investors in this space
- What categories exist already
- A category name should describe the nature of the problem being solved. And for companies selling to enterprise, the category name should relate to the business function where the problem lies. For consumers companies, the name should be direct and descriptive like “social network” “on-demand transportation”
- Evangelism of the problem and the category matters
- Company should internalize and debate the category. It should also map out what the category means to every part of the company
- Steps
- Decide who will lead the work to discover and name a category within the company
- Hand it to someone who can come in from a fresh perspective
- Fact-finding – Explore Questions to start the insights discovery
- Don’t ask customers. They don’t know what they want yet
- Keep a full-day to do this as a workshop to unplug and focus on this discussion
- Identify the kinds of people you’re addressing now and the kind of people you really want to address
- Identify the persona – the person inside companies that actually cares about this solution
- What’s the problem they don’t know they have or don’t know they can solve
- What would their world look like if they had a solution
- Identify the persona – the person inside companies that actually cares about this solution
- What are the From and To of the Customer – the journey a customer needs to take to reject the old way of doing things and adopt the new way
- Category design about making a powerful and provocative [[Story]] that causes users to make a choice. It takes people on a journey
- What’s the “new” thing that never existed before that your customers will feel they must have
- Name the category
- Talk about words that would describe the category and the impact it would have on the minds of the customer
- Words shouldn’t describe your product or solution, but the category
- play with combinations of 2-3 words, not more
- the final phrase should seem obvious
- Create a category design document with the following topics
- Category Landscape
- C Ecosystem
- Customer journey
- Category Name and description
- Make a case for why the new category should exist
- Draft plan – outline of how the company can create and dominate the category
- Decide who will lead the work to discover and name a category within the company
- Once the document is prepared for internal consumption, work starts on crafting a point of view (POV) – the category’s story which will act as the guiding principle for the company’s strategy
Point of view
- POV frames the new problem that your category identifies and sets you up as the answer
- Frames are the words and images and interactions that reinforce a bias someone is already feeling
- POV conditions the market to accept your solution to their problem
- When a company has a strong POV, actions inevitably follow
- POV has to take into account the state of technology and the mindset of society [[Worldviews]]
- POV = trailer for the story of your category and your role in it
- Story must be written down [[Story Brand]]
- POV = Problem + implications + category vision + blueprint to build category + visualize outcomes
- Iterate POV many times before sharing
- POV can help align hiring, employees, investors, product development, brand
- Steps for creating a POV
- Who – someone outside the company that you trust
- Fact-finding by interviewing the team
- how the company is different and not better
- how will the solution be created that solves the problem
- how will the world look like when implemented
- nature and values of the company
- Agree on the problem and frame it clearly
- Craft a story and iterate
- set up the problem with a dramatic flourish, then describe the solution
- Add FOMO. Make it emotional, not factual
- Inject the story with the company’s personality
- Distribute, evangelize and mobilize
Mobilization of resources
- Lightning strike is a publicity event meant to grab attention of the customers, investors, analysts and media
- Lightning strike is opposite to peanut butter marketing
- Ground wars + air wars needed
- Ground wars = lead gen, sales calls, closing deals
- air wars = lightning strike
- Lightning strike is a company event, not a marketing event. It must happen within a short timeline given the pace of development – 3 to 6 months
- 4 documents you can create to plan for a lightning strike
- category blueprint (category vision from a market perspective) -> thought leadership
- product taxonomy
- take product or solution apart and look at it from the lens of the category blueprint
- label the pieces that sync with the blueprint (name of products and features can change the way people value them)
- put it all back in a way that makes sense
- customer use cases
- category ecosystem
- All ecosystems have control points which a company can use to exert control.
- Eg: iTunes, Bloomberg for information on stocks
- All ecosystems have control points which a company can use to exert control.
- The POV is ambitious enough if you feel the stress on the company as it tries to get to the lightning strike
- Steps to put lightning strike in motion
- Who will manage it
- Plot a timeline
- Look for an event to hijack
- Decide what the strike will deliver
- Who will be targeted
- From and to journey of each target
- What will be unveiled and how
- What offerings need to be ready
- How will they deliver on the category and company POV
- Question the ambition of the vision – too much to achieve or too little, tweak accordingly
- Mobilize the team and the entire company behind it
- Watch out for potential trouble
Conditioning the market
- Evaluate where your audience will be in the next 3 to 6 months (trade shows and industry events)
- Content has to big and bold. It has to evangelize the category problem. The event is the message
- 3 to 6 strikes needed to firmly establish a category with a 6 month time interval
The Flywheel
- After you define and develop a category as described above, you then enter a stage where you can dominate a category for decades to come
- Flywheel has 3 elements -> company design, product design and category design
- A regular cadence of lightning strikes will provide the force to put the flywheel in motion
- category expansion = category flywheel
- Category harvesting is about evolutionary improvement seen in the 3rd phase of the evolution of markets
Designing your personal category
- identify a skill you have and find a need
- Be the go-to person to solve a particular problem
- your value = potential market for what you do + your position in that market + proof that you can deliver on your promises
- Create a POV and live it
- Develop an ecosystem of partners, supporters and colleagues
- Find an opportunity to do a lightning strike
Other highlights
- Market cap of category kings is driven by potential and not market cap
- Before you condition the market, you need to condition the company
- Focus on future economics, not today’s revenue
- Category Design Examples [[Positioning]] [[Niche]]
- Frozen foods business by Clarence Birdseye
- Salesforce with the “no software” and “the end of software” campaign
- Business technology optimization
- social network
- on-demand transportation
- community-driven hospitality – Airbnb
- visual analytics – Tableau
- Personal digital assistant – Palm
- Book Recommendations [[Reading List]]
