What are the biggest mistakes you made when creating a category

Answer

5 Answers

Category Creation Messaging Strategy

Scott Schwarzhoff

Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y

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 ...Read More

1,109 Views
Hila Segal

WalkMe Senior Vice President, Product Marketing | Formerly Clari, Observe.AI, Vendavo, Amdocs • 4y

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 fir ...Read More

691 Views
Martin Raygoza

Diageo Head of Tequila Portfolio • 3y

It is relatively easy to get it wrong when creating a new category, the complication is in the word "new". So it is very important to make sure you understand all the implications for your business to reduce the possibility of failure. Here is in my opinion some of the most common mistake done by organizations trying to expand to new categories. Bad resource management: You must make sure you understand the economics of this decision for your business in every way: People, money, know-how and ti ...Read More

2,785 Views
Jeff Hardison

Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 3y

One of the biggest category creation mistakes is trying to create your own category — when there's already a category you could join and dominate as the leader.

Many of the "category creation" companies people often trumpet didn't really create the categories from scratch. They took emerging categories, and explained the category and their concomitant leadership in the category better than anyone else.

684 Views
Anthony Kennada

AudiencePlus CEO • 8y

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.

1,808 Views