Category Creation

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.

I’ve found that category creation is always more time and resource intensive than competing in an existing category. When creating a new category, you’re doing a lot of education about how companies can recognize the fact that they have a problem, why they need to prioritize (and budget for) solving that problem and the new approach to solving that problem. It's like you’re defining the rules of a new sport you’re going to play, defining who’ll be in the “league” and then playing. Competing in a category that already exists is more a matter of learning the rules of the existing sport in an existing league, etc. Customers already have budget (potentially) allocated to solving the problem, know what criteria to use to select a vendor, know which vendors to short-list and then pick a vendor from there. Your product marketing, in this instance, will be primarily focused on “Why choose us.”

It really depends on how much competition exists in the market. If you're a market of 1 you'll have to fund 100% of market education and this will take time. In this situation rely heavily on your existing customers and early adopters as champions and spokespeople for the category - recruit them in creative ways to evangelize the new category and why change. You need great relationships at the most senior levels to pull this off - don't be afraid to ask your CEO and other executives to help in this effort. Turn these early customers into "celebrities" of the new category and show their success in every possible way. Also, invest in educating Forrester and Gartner analysts by showing them the new way through your customer success. This is a long journey so be prepared but you want to be the one shaping their POVs about this emerging market category.  If there's already competition then the good news is that they are all investing in the education effort. You'll likely see more healthy inbound as people are actively searching for the new solution. In this case, you'll need to invest in differentiation and why you vs. the others but you also have a great opportunity to rise as the authority in the space with great content. 

This comparison reminds me of retailers marketing to new vs. existing shoppers. It's 5 times more expensive to acquire a new customer compared to getting an existing customer to purchase. When you're creating a new category you need to do a lot of work to convince customers that they have a problem to be solved. You're selling something that isn't a line item on a budget, so even when your stakeholder is convinced, they may have to convince internal decision makers. So obviously it's a bigger effort to market a new category vs. something like fraud protection that's an existing category and a line item on a budget. But where the analogy differs is in terms of competition. If you're entering an existing category that's crowded, your product will need to have a niche or differentiation to win market share. If you're first or second in a new category that has a large addressable market, there's a lot of upside to be won. What's the willingness of your target customer to pay? Are you solving a big problem that's a top priority? Especially with concerns about the economy, how can you make sure that your product is seen as a must-have vs. a nice to have? That your product will help the customer's bottom line either by saving them time or money, growing revenue, or both?!

To be honest, this has been difficult to figure out. I don't think we have the best solution yet, but for now, we write down positioning statetements for each product, which include key messages, to ensure that we have one clear reference for other teams in the company. Each positioning statement is versioned to make sure we're tracking how often its being changed.  What I've found is these internal docs are most useful to PMM or the rest of marketing. But they aren't great at dissemination. The most effective way to disseminate your messaging is repeating it as many times in as many formats (web pages, content, developer docs, internal sales training) as possible. 

We have a "storybook" with all of our core messaging. It's a powerpoint with a lot of slides covering segmentation, personas, products, and all the appropriate messaging that goes along with it. It can be a bit heavy (to download) but it's the one source everyone knows about. We host it on our internal sales enablement tool - Highspot.

It's important that everyone who works at your company understands your value propositions and differentiators. At Salesforce we did a corporate messaging certification once a year where everyone at the the company practices the pitch live with their team. At Bolt we're going through that exercise and making it fun. As we roll out a refined pitch, we've made a 50 word and 150 word version, that's short and simple. Next we're launching a contest with leaders from each department recording themselves doing the pitch and then tagging people on their team to make videos. Even if a lot of your company aren't customer facing, it's important that everyone understands the goals and messaging so that they're motivated and understand how their work has an impact.

Awareness and the top of the funnel are key. With a new category, you'll need to make prospects aware of the problem you're solving and convince them that this is a problem they have. While some ecommerce providers have one-click checkout, not every retailer sees that as a top priority and something they need to give shoppers. So we need to reframe the discussion to be about how 70% of ecommerce carts are abandoned and how that represents $1 trillion in transactions. And how it's harder than ever to know who your shoppers are with privacy changes, and the importance of having more shopper accounts to be able to effectively target shoppers and personalize their experiences. How can we make these problems feel important to prospects and flip the narrative so that we come across as a company that understand their challenges and are here to help? As you have customers who are live and see success with your product, tell their stories. When you get a customer who agrees to do an interview make the most out of that content. If they're comfortable, record the interview. Then you can turn that into a success story for your website, a slide for your pitch deck, social media posts with video snippets or quotes, and content for a virtual event. That customer validation has a big impact with prospects, especially if they have success metrics.

Category creation is a unique messaging and positioning initiative when your startup is providing a differentiated value that doesn’t exist in the industry today. When I think about new markets like the subscription economy or SaaS platforms, these categories didn’t exist a few decades ago.  Every startup should look at existing categories and NOT try to fit into a category if that isn’t the value for customers. Often times, customer advisory boards help guide and share perspectives on the ecosystem and act as a sounding board for value creation for a new category.

In my experience, category creation requires two things at the start: * Point of View - which articulates your perspective on the problem(s) your target market is looking to solve [why is the problem worth solving, what are the key steps in solving the problem, what kind of tech solutions will help you to solve the problem].  * Positioning - which articulates your unique value proposition for your target market The messages and stories that flow from this become the basis for your campaigns. Generally, you’ll create thought leadership content designed to educate the market on recognizing the problem, why they need to solve it and how. While digital channels are most scalable (webinars, ebooks, website) you’ll also want to make sure you’ve got the right assets for your sales and customer teams as they’re on the front line delivering the message to prospects and customers on a daily basis.

Winning your category and taking control of it can be a super powerful strategy. However, I think too many go straight to creating a new category. We should first strongly consider how we can redesign a category that exists and win by renewing how people think about the category. Category creation isn’t for everyone. It is really hard to do. While it can be powerful, it can also be really difficult to pull off, take a long time, get expensive, and become a major distraction for your team if it’s not the right approach. I have seen a lot more success with redefining a category that has old-school incumbents and the way of doing things. Such a strategy needs a lot of channels to come together. PR, analyst relations, social influencers, and a content marketing strategy combined with strong messaging can create momentum for change in the consumer’s mind. Of course, a strong and differentiated product offering is a key ingredient as well. Another important consideration is to create sub-categories within known categories. Recently at TrustRadius, our team disrupted the category of buyer intent data by creating and pushing a sub-category called “downstream intent”. We realized that the biggest competition wasn’t direct competitors, but customer confusion among different types of intent data providers. Downstream intent is now starting to be a familiar term associated with b2b review sites offering intent data that is more down-funnel. This strategy has been in motion for a year and a half. Category design takes time.

If you're building demand for a new category, it's ideal that there's runway for a platform and not just a handful of features. Can you start in one area that you're uniquely positioned to own and then grow to serve different sizes of customers (SMB to mid-market to enterprise) or different stages (expand from checkout to post-purchase or discovery)?  It's important to prioritize where to focus initially and where to expand. Internal prioritization is great, and don't forget to talk to customers and prospects so you can understand where the demand is and where needs are unmet.

The category name should make clear to the customer how your the type of technology solves the challenge they are experiencing it. It is critical that the clarity and understanding of the problem are evident. More importantly, it is critical that your organization closely aligns itself with this category, regardless of the name. In order to become a Category King, you must be the first brand consumers associate with the category. This can be done via messaging, research, campaigns, and most importantly - a mix of all the channels for your target audience uses.

Naming is important! Ideally your category is established enough that there are industry terms that you can use. That way you're building brand equity for your brand name and using category terms that explain what your brand does. For example, I believe Gartner coined the term composable commerce for when retailers want the ability to pick and choose ecommerce technology instead of adopting a monolithic structure. If you're entering a category that has a name or term, make sure you're leveraging these concepts that your prospects are already familiar with. And of course use SEO & SEM to rank in search results for the category. In the case of Bolt, that is our brand name that we want to build brand equity for and one-click checkout is the category. While we want to build association with Bolt and one-click, we always use "checkout" at least the first time because we want to make sure retailers and shoppers understand what the company does.

One of the biggest mistakes I see product marketers make is they forget that their buyer is human. They have appealed to business case, logic, industry research, and demonstrate ROI, but sometimes they fail to simply tell a human story. B2B software buyers are people too. And like any buyer of really any product, they want to be pulled in by brands that "get" them. They are looking for themselves in the pages of your datasheets, web pages, and slide decks. So I always think that product marketers need to start with an appreciation of the pain felt by their target buyer persona. They need to empathize with that. When starting from a place of empathy it's easier to find the language to connect and show buyers a better way, through whatever solution you're selling.  

* Several things come to mind here: Messaging is too generic: you’ve not done a good job of really identifying the audience and understanding what they care about in order to develop a specific message * Messaging doesn’t “provoke:” the objective of a message is to get your audience to do or feel something - if its too blase, you’ll have a hard time achieving that objective * Messaging is inward focused: if you’re targeting an external audience, you’ve not done a good job of using the words/mental models that your audience uses - and are using too many buzzwords/ internal lingo (“marketing speak”)

They set and forget. People change. Customers change. Needs change. So your messaging will need to change with it. For that reason, it's good to do a high-level analysis of your messaging at least annually, if not more often. Make sure it still resonates with customers, make sure additional segments haven't appeared, make sure conversions haven't decreased on key landing pages, etc. 

Every company wants to be the #1 in their field. I would argue that if your company is undeniably #1 in its market, you don’t often make this proclamation. People already know it. It’s very similar to the notion that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” Companies believe that by saying they’re #1, consumers will feel a level of comfort knowing that they are buying the best. To solve this problem, ask yourself, “Are my potential customers really trying to buy #1?” Chances are, probably not – they’re not trying to buy your product simply because it’s the best, they’re trying to buy some unique aspect or characteristic of your product that makes it the best. What specific attributes of the market leading solution in your industry do buyers care about? The more specific you can be, the better. Focus your messaging on yuor customers and their pain points not driving your own company messaging. This is key. The easiest way to identify this issue is to read your company’s messaging and simply ask yourself, “Does our company care about this, or does our potential customer?” Lastly, humanize your message. To generate a message with impact, you’ll need to understand how it can be meaningful to your target audience. You want to create a “pull.” Building a connection with your prospects is way better than simply handing them the information, right? By doing so, you let them figure out how your products and services can be valuable to them.

* Not value-oriented: They focus on features and functionality, not value and benefits * They’re not customer-centric: They aren’t putting themselves in the target audience’s shoes, to make sure the language is what customers would use and the benefits are things customers would care about * Writing copy instead of messaging: You can write some great-sounding sentences that are more copy than messaging; that is, it's hard for other people to distill down the essence of what you're trying to say and they're instead forced to just use that copy verbatim or not at all. You should be able to distill down the core elements of the messaging into its key components, which can be phrased in different ways for different audiences and channels.  * Thinking it has to be perfect right out of the gate and/or not revisiting messaging again after it’s shipped: Messaging is a constant evolution. You should continue to shape and mold it as you learn more and as the market changes. Air out those static, stale messaging docs every few months to see if there’s anything you can make better!

It can be hard to keep messaging simple and poignant. It takes time, revs, and validation. There's pressure to get it perfect right off the bat. Or people sit and forget. Let it evolve over time.  Something I've learned is how valuable it can be to tap the emotional benefit. It's still important to have rational data points so they can justify the decision, but a great story compels. 

One of the biggest mistakes I see when it comes to messaging in product marketing is trying to write to everybody at once. This comes back to the importance of who you are actually trying to reach with your content, if your language is too broad it won't land with anybody, better to be specific and make an impact with the audience you care about. This can also happen a lot when you write by committee - a surefire way to end up with sentences with many good words but don't mean much together. This is why I think it's really important to have a good chain of command for content creation > editing > publishing. If content touches too many hands it can end up in a state where it feels like a human didn't actually write it.

I think a lot of product marketers underestimate the importance of understanding why customers use their product at a fundamental level. I've made this mistake in the past where I've directly jumped to articulating product or feature value when working on messaging, instead of first trying to internalize how customers perceive product value. There's a few things you could incorporate into your messaging process to avoid these pitfalls: (1) Spend a lot of time using the product. If your product requires integration / implementation (like Modern Treasury :)), spend time with customer success, sales engineering and product developing a mental map of how the product fits into the customers workflows or business model. (2) Identify jobs-to-be-done. I describe in detail why I like this framework so much here - https://dysposition.com/2021/08/13/part-2-positioning-for-startups/ (3) Go deep on the competition. Understand how they perform the same jobs for your ICP. This will help you ground your messaging in market realities, making it more compelling and relatable to your ICP.  

Not validating it enough and getting sucked into internal debates between stakeholders. Messaging can be very subjective and emotional. When working on messaging for a new product - 1. Start very early, put the first draft of messaging and continue to refine. 2. Write the press release early too and use it as a way to create alignment. 3. Validate. validate. validate. Go onsite with customers, interview Beta users, and learn from CS/implementation/sales teams. This will help you drive buy-in to the new messaging by using the proof points from customer interviews. 

Not speaking in the language of the customer. We often alienate our customer with jargon and irrelevant data points or benefits. We don't need to say everything we do in every single touchpoint. Be strategic, be succinct, and be customer-focused.  I would also add that PMMs should focus on clarity over cleverness. If you can be clear and clever, then go for it. :)

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.

I love Anthony's answer. I suspect he and I both spend time thinking about this exact issue from the perspective of the market leader... I'd add that you can find a market niche that takes advantage of the market your competitor has carved out. Their leadership is creating demand, but they are probably not positioned to service all of it. Another point about followership is that it can be less expensive, so you may have advantages in cost structure that translate into pricing advantages. This could also help you target smaller segments than your competitor.

I agree with Anthony. If you're looking to enter a space that has already been defined, what you need to do is create a niche and/or double down on the unique approach you bring to the space.A lot of this will be reflected in the product you create, but your marketing needs to work really hard to help prospects clearly position your product in their minds relative to the product leader that has already defined the game.  I can think of a few examples here:  -MailChimp is the market leader in email marketing, but products like Drip and ConvertKit entered the market and eventually spun off into their own category (drip software)  -Zendesk is the market leader in customer support/helpdesk ticketig. Then Front came in as a "shared inbox" solution and Help Scout came in from th "customer experience" angle.

First thing, how are you segmenting the market and determining evolving customer needs/priorities? Great news - no product category stays fixed for very long. There’s always some new ’shift’ that the incumbent product category leaders don’t see coming that provides your company with a new business opportunity. Therefore, you want to determine, in a data-rich, customer-obsessed way, what the current requirements are for success are in the evolving category. Easiest way to do this is to build a simple 2x2 market segmentation chart. Use customer-interview data on their evolving needs and challenges to help determine what the X and Y axis are going to be and what the customer requirements are for each of the 4 quadrants. I’ll use Okta’s entry into the multi-factor authentication market as an example. Obviously, RSA has been the leader in this space for years. But plotting out a present-day 2x2 view of the market shows a lot of opportunity. On the x-axis, we had deployment model - on-premises on the left, cloud on the right. On the y-axis, we had sophistication - simple on the bottom and intelligent on the top. Then we’d bucket our customers into those different quadrants. So, security-conscious, regulated customers tended to be more on the lower-left. The broader market of companies worried about the next big data breach were on the lower-right (think Target and Equifax breaches). They’re looking for something lightweight, simple but effective to protect against pfishing attacks (eg: passwords suck). Then, in the upper-right, that’s the more progressive CISO looking at a whole new set of capabilities roughly called Zero Trust. And there’s really no-one in the upper left quadrant. Once you have the customer needs segmented, you can put the top 1-2 vendors into each bucket. Lower-left, that’s RSA. Lower-right, that’s Duo. Upper-right is also Duo but increasingly Microsoft. Stepping back and looking at both a customer and competitor view of the market shows the opportunity. The near-term goal was to build a product that took on Duo head-to-head and add that capability to our core SSO product. In the field, we ran a ‘would you like fries with that’ go-to-market motion. You already bought the hamburger (SSO) from us, so why not add two-factor authentication (MFA) to the order? Beyond that, there’s a question - go after the legacy RSA market, which requires a bunch of old-school connectors. Or move into the Intelligent/advanced side of the market. We focused on where the puck is going, not where it is today. And that’s the upper-right (Cloud/Intelligent) quadrant where the whole Zero Trust market is heading. So, a lot of time and energy spent getting into what we called ‘contextual access management’ - basically, putting a big brain on top of our MFA product that used our core understanding of identity context to know if someone is a malicious actor or not. This is a ‘play chess not checkers’ approach. Forget the old legacy incumbent, the real goal is plotting out the evolving customer priorities, connecting your company’s current product portfolio against those priorities and planning ahead for where the market is ultimately going to go.

@Anthony Kennada really has the right idea in terms of how to think about this. I break it up slightly differently, but alog very similar lines: 1. Be the category's next generation. Address the defining competitor's shortcomings by determining problems not solved by the first mover. 2. Expand into a tangential niche. Use the fact that someone else has defined the category, then point out a particular market segment (or set of segments), or use case, not well served by that competitor. In this scenario, it may not even be a competitor anymore, and its existence may in fact be beneficial. 3. Explain why that category was relevant last year, but won't be by next. That competitor defined the category, let them have it because it won't matter by the time you're done. Here, you're attacking the shortcomings of the category, not the competitor(s). Then, of course, you have to define the new category.

Depends - if you’re able to differentiate enough to be a #1 or #2 player in the market, stick with the current category. I would, however, start to amp up the thought leadership so that you can influence the category more going forward so you can start to play your own game. Not knowing more details its hard to go into specifics here, but you could also consider creating an off-shoot of the current category (again leaning into your differentiation) and tell the story around how “other vendors are doing things the old way” and you’re providing a “new way” to solve the problem [of course this requires you to be clear that the new way delivers a lot more value than the “old way”].

Have a strong point of view on the market and don't be afraid to reframe the current definition, but be prepared to invest heavily in education and thought leadership. Rely on proof points to support your narrative in the form of customer advocates that evangelize your definition and why it drives value. The good and the bad news is that someone has already created the initial interest - invest in execution and authority marketing to grab market share. 

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.

I don’t think there are a lot of completely new categories created these days. In enterprise software, most new companies are improving on existing ways of solving the same problems we’ve had for a couple decades. So, the real question, I think, is how to align on a shared view of what the ‘new world’ requirements are to winning a market that has evolved. At Okta, we had a strong POV on the beliefs customers should have when considering a new approach to identity. For us, ‘cloud-first, enable best-in-breed, simplicity, and secure-by-design’ have been core tenets for how we view the world since day 1. We would shape RFPs, analyst submissions, and early customer development around these core beliefs. With a shared view of how a customer should solve a problem in hand, then it’s much easier to gain buy-in to pursue a category creation or evolution strategy. Here’s the Citrix Mobility pitch we used, same thing. At Citrix, every capability is rated on a 3-point scale: * Table-stakes: required capabilities that everyone and where there’s no clear uniqueness. * Competitive differentiators: everyone has the capability, but your company does it better * Purple cows: your company provides this capability and no one else has it So in practice, here’s how that netted out for our entry into the mobility market: * Mobile Device Management: table stakes. Everyone has it, no one had a big advantage * Mobile App Management: differentiated. We put a security ‘wrapper’ around applications that protected them from security breaches. Not unique to us but the easy wrapping capabilities were novel. * Mobile Data Management: purple cow. No mobility vendor offered a secure Dropbox-like capability. We generated 70% of our mobility sales based on this unique capability. We didn’t create the MDM market - AirWatch did. But we did create a new ‘super market’ called EMM or Enterprise Mobility Management, which we defined as Device, App, and Data Management. PMM and PM collaborated on its construction and presented this to executive management, but only after vetting with early customer adopters, analysts, and influencers. So, we came to the discussion with data in hand vs. an opinion.

Trying to get buy-in over a theoretical outcome is always an uphill battle. I would focus on making meaningful progress by yourself on category design. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Test things out and gain some traction. And then worry about getting buy-in to do more of what works. It will also be important to educate your team on why category creation (or redefinition) is the right strategy for your company at this time. Get them to read the book “Play Bigger” by Christopher Lochhead. Follow Christoper Lochhead on LinkedIn for bite-sized insights on the topic. Show them examples of companies in a similar situation winning with category design techniques. Combining this education with early proof that this is the right move for your company can really help your team see the light.

Not everyone should pursue a category creation strategy. It might be appealing but it's a huge heavy-lift and will require significant investment and buy-in from everyone in the company - not just your executives. It really all starts from the story - the strategic narrative - and how strong and new it is to justify creating a new category. Spend time on getting this right, validated, and agreed upon internally and this will naturally guide the team on the category question. The biggest champion and spokesperson of the category in the company is the CEO - collaborate with him/her to get the story super tight. 

Category naming is more art than science. It involves a deep understanding of your solution space, the language of your existing and prospective customers, and the founder's intuition into the vision for the business.   Conventional wisdom suggests that a category name be no more than three words, and should capture the use case of your product as opposed to just features/benefits. Examples: Customer Relationship Management, Marketing Automation, Direct Care Administration.   I would highly recommend doing user research in defining your category name to avoid any language that has unanticipated triggers for your prospects. For example, when defining Hint's category, our initial instinct was to define Direct Care Plan Administration (DPA). Upon user testing, however, we found our users (Direct Care Physicians) reacted very strongly to the word "Plan" as being too closely associated with health insurance - an industry they were actively trying to distance themselves from. Based on this overwhelmingly universal feedback, we decided to pivot our category name to Direct Care Administration to capture similar concepts without the trigger word.   It's also possible to define sub-categories within a larger context, which can shortcut the educational component needed in developing a completely new context. Example: The Electric Toothbrush is a sub-category of the Toothbrush. Thus it can ride on all the previous consumer knowledge about toothbrushes and focus more on the key differentiators from previous solutions. 

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.

Connect the name of the new category with something familiar to your market: Horses + Carriages => Horseless Carriage => Automobile. And because Sharebird says my answer is too short, I will add this sentence to comply. Apparently, the answer needs to be 300 words or more so I'll keep typing gibberish until I meet this completely arbitrary requirement. 

Naming a new category is a big deal. Don't name it just by the scope and capabilities of your own solution - think bigger. A few things to help the naming process: 1. Talk to customers and try not to lead the witness. Understand what terms they use to describe the pain points and expected business value of the category. Make sure you talk to a broad set of customers that represent different industries, segments, and buying personas.  2. Research what other categories exist, how much traction they have, how they are defined, and what's the potential overlap. Create a map of the landscape. Leverage analyst reports, G2, and other review platforms.  3. Create a hypothesis and test it - internally and externally with your partners, CABs, analysts.  4. Once you land on a name go all-in by creating content and thought leadership to educate the market. Every employee in the company becomes an evangelist of the new category and consistency matters. Also, rely heavily on your customers and early adopters to promote the new 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.

One of the biggest challenges we had in the early days was competing against Microsoft. They are the grand-daddy of identity in that they created Active Directory, which has been the authoritative directory for every enterprise for decades. As you can imagine, they wanted to hold on to this critical IT control point for as long as possible as the world moved to the cloud, so they came out with something called Azure Active Directory, which is a directly competitive product to Okta’s. The reason why this was a huge challenge early on was the integration that Microsoft identity has with Office365, their flagship product. So, if the world is moving to SaaS software, well, the number one initiative for every company out there is to get Office365 deployed. How do you do that? Using Azure Active Directory. So, we had to compete not only against the 800lb gorilla’s directly competitive product, but we ALSO had to deal with positioning ourselves as best for deploying the #1 killer app - Office365. So, early on, we tried the head-to-head route. But, as you can imagine, the results were mixed as we basically played into Microsoft's hands ("we can deploy Office365 too, but we can do it faster than Microsoft" ... yeah, that didn't win the deal). So, we evolved the playbook. Over the last few years, we’ve had an 80% win rate. Since everyone has asked me at some point, ‘how did you beat Microsoft’, I thought I’d write down our playbook in a nutshell. Below are 10 steps we took to win vs. the market incumbent and 800lb gorilla. Attached is a more detailed walkthrough of each step: 1. Start with a strong founder insight 2. Address a big market with lots of room to expand and/or pivot 3. Build a compelling, simple-to-use ‘core’ product that people love 4. Make IT the transformative hero 5. Sell on customer value 6. Invest in customers first with a maniacal focus on their success 7. Tell your story through the lens of your customers 8. Rewrite the rules to go beyond your competitor’s capabilities 9. Build an ecosystem moat 10. Expand into disruptive market adjacencies

Category creation is a journey into the unknown. There are rarely clear right or wrong answers at the beginning so brace yourself for the ride.  Here are a few areas to think about:  - Category name. You want to find a name that represents the new world and the promise of the category while making it understandable and relatable. Don't be tempted to narrowly represent your product with the name. Think big.  - Start early with the analysts. Your efforts will likely not move the needle for the first 12-18 months but keep investing in analyst education to help shape their POV. - Category creation is a company-wide effort. Don't think of it as just the responsibility of the marketing team. Category creation requires the entire company - from sales, CS, and marketing to engineering, implementation, and HR - to rally behind the story and evangelize it with customers, prospects, partners, candidates, and vendors. It's that level of commitment and consistency that is required for the market to take notice.  - Category creation is not for everyone. Not every new product or solution deserves a new category. Think long and hard if you are really in the business of a new category or disrupting an existing one.