Who should own our category creation efforts? Brand Marketing or Product Marketing?
Category creation (or making the decision to join an existing category) should be a joint effort between brand and product marketing leadership (and sometimes comms leadership), with an ultimate approver in the C-suite, either the CMO or CEO.
Here are some of the things that brand and product marketing would own as part of the category evaluation process:
Product Marketing:
- Competitive intelligence: how are competitors referring to themselves?
- Research/advice from industry analysts. Where do analysts see our company fitting in best? Any new up-and-coming category names being adopted that we should consider?
- Category name testing - both quantitative and qualitative research with your target buyers.
- How the brand messaging house or brand narrative connects to product messaging. For example, product marketing would be involved in defining brand value propositions that are both important to buyers, differentiated, and ownable/connected to concrete product value.
Brand marketing:
- High level brand messaging house which would include the vision/mission/values, category, and brand narrative.
- Brand guidelines for using the category name (in written & visual form). For example, we made the decision not to create a logo lockup for "Momentive: an experience management company". But we did create brand guidelines for how to use the term "experience management" in content.
- Category/brand awareness campaigns. If you're creating a new category, brand marketing must think about how to invest in not only driving awareness of the brand, but also the category itself. Sometimes it may benefit you to join an existing category that already has significant usage/awareness.
Comms:
- Company boilerplate (the "About [Company]" section used in press releases)
At my time at SurveyMonkey, now Momentive, I've seen us attempt to create our own category ("people powered data") as well as join an existing category ("experience management"). I'll reiterate that starting a new category can be exciting as it signals disruption and innovation, but it requires significant investment to get it to stick. We didn't invest in "people powered data" and it eventually fizzled and was retired.