AMA: Gainsight Former Chief Marketing Officer, Anthony Kennada on Category Creation

Great question, and one that I’ve done some writing on (see link below). http://www.categorydev.com/category-branding/ There are SEO, branding, PR/AR and many other implications to selecting a category name – so it’s important to get this right. I believe new categories and markets are created when a person / job title exists that is not being served in a meaningful way by an existing vendor. Categories that speak to that person, rather than the product, tend to better resonate. Analysts will suggest archaic category naming conventions that will undoubtedly result in an acronym – Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Recurring Revenue Management (RRM), etc. My POV is that there’s not a lot of conviction for a marketer (or customer) in those categories. Instead, look for clues in the customer job titles and anchor around a common problem. We were fortunate that a title existed in the marketplace called the “Customer Success Manager,” but no one was championing the profession in a meaningful way. Our answer was clear that the category should be called Customer Success. The last piece to consider is SEO and search volume. Is your category easily discoverable when a potential customer is searching for a solution to their pain points? Using Google Trends to help narrow down a short list of ideas is helpful.

Is it clear that the competitor is currently the market leader? Are they a large incumbent (thinking what Salesforce is to CRM, for example) or a few years ahead of you? If so, it may be the case that you are indeed in a challenger position for an already defined market in which the disruption playbook is a better strategy. Alternatively, can you change the conversation and create a tangential category that is completely different? Consider Hubspot. Would consensus peg them as a CRM/MA competitor, or are they the thought leaders for Inbound Marketing? They are a great example of a company who changed the conversation and carved out a new category and community tangential to an already crowded space.

It has to start at the top. Creating a category is very expensive, so you’ll need the board and CEO to be bought in. Frankly, it impacts everything from fundraising strategy to a lot of decision making on deploying marketing spend. The question comes back to the strategic value you’re hoping to create for the company – and maybe your first step is framing that conversation with your CEO. Are you trying to build a large business (IPO+) that is addressing a massive gap in the market and an underserved buyer? That market may be a good candidate for category creation. Can your target persona benefit from partnership in strategy definition in addition to products? That may be another good signal. If the vision of your executive team is to solve a very specific problem set that does not require much business transformation, or access to capital is much more limited relative to peer companies, then category creation may not be the most efficient way to build your go-to-market.

A lot of effort. I think you need to be comfortable playing the long game. Think about it this way, if we took a “typical” marketing approach and started outbound prospecting into manufacturing companies on the iron belt asking them to be routed to the person who runs Customer Success, we would get a lot of confusion on the other end of the phone. Forget about a cold pitch on technology to operationalize and scale Customer Success! You need to spend a lot of time educating the market (building the wave) and then monetizing (surfing the wave). You need to win their hearts and also their minds. This takes a long time – and money – and gets frustrating when there aren’t a lot of great benchmarks / anecdotes for what early success looks like here. Oftentimes in category creation, you also need to teach the market how to buy. In many cases your target persona has never procured technology to solve their problem before. We’ve run campaigns that are typically considered “late stage content,” such as ROI calculators, platform buyer’s guides, sample RFPs, etc., but evangelized at the top of the funnel to educate the market. These are extra considerations that typical “disruption marketers” may not need to make if attacking a known category.

Waiting too long to layer in the tried and true tactics that work. I mentioned in another response that traditional tactics such as outbound prospecting or PPC did not convert well early in our years building Gainsight and Customer Success. Reason being, no one knew what CS was nor were they doing much searching online! However once your category tips, game on. I regret waiting 1-2 quarters too late to ramp our paid media spend, double down on SDRs, etc.

I definitely don’t think you need to earn the right – or at least, no one gave us the right to do so with Customer Success. At the end of the day, category creation has more to do with the people within the job function that you’re serving than the actual product that you sell. I don’t find that morally dubious, I believe that eventually all products become somewhat commoditized. Pepsi or Coke? At the end of the day, what people buy into is the brand that you’ve developed and the trust that you’ve created with your customers and the market at large. In SaaS for example, there’s a big push on prescriptiveness today. Customers don’t “just” want your product, but they want you to help them realize the outcomes that they’re trying to drive. Part of that is through your product set, but likely a bigger part of that is (a) best practices oriented around the job / career, (b) benchmarking against a cohort of customers that look like them, and (c) connecting them with resources and networking to help them become successful.

I don’t see a difference actually, at least for technology companies. At the end of the day, customers don’t want your product, they want outcomes that your product (and company) help them derive. Few examples: • Uber/Lyft sell the ability to get from point A to point B without a car. The app is just a vehicle (pun intended). • AirBnB sells the ability to belong / feel at home anywhere in the world. • Etc. Start by deeply understanding your persona and work backwards from there. Understand the jobs they’re looking to tackle and how your product and company both have a role to play in concert with each other.

I would orchestrate it as a compelling event to re-invent yourself. You can choose to which extent you would take that – rebranding the company, new logo, etc. – but ultimately you need to let the world know that something new is happening. At Gainsight (or Jbara Software as we were called at the time), we did the following: • Rebranded the company • Brand new website • Press release / media outreach under embargo • Email to our entire database • Announced our Series A financing (compelling event), industry conference, etc. It made all the difference as we did everything we can to align the new, Gainsight, brand with the movement and community we were building.