How much effort is it to market products that create new categories? As in time and touches vs. existing products.

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 ...Read More

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 ef ...Read More

I would suggest to think of entering or creating new categories with the same complexities of creating a new business. So definitely it is easier to promote products. Depending on how far form you core business will be the level of difficulty of creating a new category, so I would suggest to try to stake within your industry and your sector. When deciding to start on this journey make sure you are taking into consideration both internal and external factors: Internal: Resources available; expert ...Read More

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 t ...Read More

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 ...Read More