thanks for pressing play. This is Lock head on, marketing the odd cast that examines the strategies behind what makes legendary marketing legendary. On this episode, let's talk about why category is the new strategy were sponsored by the good folks at Oracle Net Suite. You could learn how to turbocharge the growth of your business at net suite dot com slash different. And while you're there as a listener to this podcast, Ubilla set up a free one. Our growth review with an expert in your industry net suite is the platform for turbocharging your growth, and they want to help you figure out how to do that. To go to net suite dot coms last different and set up your free growth review today. Now hey ho, let's go. This is locked head of marketing podcast that helps you develop the lens for what makes legendary marketing legendary. Hosted by Christopher Long Head three times CMO, Godfather category designed and a high school dropout with marketing journal calls one of the best minds and marketing and the economist calls

off putting to some.

All right, so why is category new strategy? I would assert to you that thing this category, conversations become not the hottest conversation in marketing, certainly one of them and one of the biggest conversations in in business, particularly in Silicon Valley. I would assert to you that legendary companies are not doing things that are what you would call incrementally better. And I'm not saying there isn't a place for incrementalism. Um, but companies that want to do legendary shit don't focus on the incremental. They are focused on what you might think of is the exponential different? And there's a side note on a personal level, you know, my dream is one day more people focus on their exponentially different than their incrementally better. But I think that's incredibly true and incredibly important in business. And why is that the case? Most legendary companies introduced the world to entirely new categories of business entirely.

New ways of doing things. These are the companies that shape our lives, and frankly, they design a different future for all of us. The most legendary marketers, entrepreneurs, inventors and traders of any kind are on a mission to make the future different, versus the companies who want a profit from the world being the same, and I think that's an important distinction. Um, if you're trying to do marketing that, that doesn't move the needle, but just drives of revenue in a category A market category you hope remains stagnant in the same A. This is the wrong podcast for you and be, um maybe you need to get a job of the D. M.

V. Because the rate of technology and category change we have today is unprecedented. We all know that. And I think the most exciting companies are not ones that are betting on the past being the future, but are the ones that are betting on the future being different. And they want to be the companies that create that future by giving us new ways of living, thinking or doing business often, sometimes by solving a problem we didn't know we had. Or maybe a problem. We never paid any attention to, um, you know, and there's some big example started by Biggie entrepreneurs, and those are pretty easy to spot. So if you think about an Airbnb by way of example, in the beginning,

to most people, myself included, renting your couch sounds like a really dumb idea. Well, not so dumb, it turns out, and companies like Google, Amazon, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Salesforce these giant market cap companies are start ups, you know. See, it's easy to forget that Amazon was started by one dude about 25 years ago. One guy created that right And the same thing about Palo Alto networks in Cisco and Salesforce. These air entrepreneurial companies that have changed everything and they not only,

um, um built and delivered amazing products, but they built an incredible company product in category at the same time. However, it's also possible for Smalley entrepreneurs to do this on a recent episode of my other podcast. Follow You're different. We had cards against humanity, Ah, co founder co creator the designer Max Temkin on. And, um, you know, these folks had a crazy idea for, uh, you know, you might consider us a rude,

certainly provocative, what they now call adult party game. There was nothing like it. They raised a few $1000 on Kickstarter, and today, Cards Against Humanity is a the number one selling card game on Amazon and has been for the better part of 10 years and be like all legendary, um, marketers Max and Co designed a whole new category called Adult Party Game, and there are many, many dozens of knockoffs. Another Somali entrepeneur example I love is, um I think if you'd hired, um, and I don't necessarily mean to pick on them. I I admire them, but let's just pick on them anyway.

If you'd hired McKinsey and you said, Hey, em, can you look at the bakery market category in the United States and see if you can find ah, you know, an opportunity for, ah, new category, a new idea for a bakery? I doubt they would have come back with nothing bundt cake, but nothing Bundt Cake has over 100 and 25 franchises, and they purposely differentiated themselves. They're not just a bakery there, a chain of bundt cake bakeries. And so now they dominate a market category that they are the principal instigator, creator,

designer of the Bundt Cake Bakery, who knew? And then another one I love is started by a gal named Step a Debbie Sterling, and she graduated from Stanford and I forget exactly what her degree was in. But it was in what today is called a stem field science, technology, engineering and math. And so she, uh she wanted to give the some of the girls in her life stem toys for girls. And there were lots of stem toys for boys, McCann Oh, sets and, you know, shit like that. But she couldn't couldn't find any that would appeal to girls. And she saw that as a missing.

And so she got passionate about solving that mission, Or that in solving that missing. And today she is the founder of a company called Goldie Box instead of Goldie Locks, Goldie Box. And they are the prime, that primary, uh, purveyor and supplier of stem toys for girls. And not only have they built amazing products, they designed a category and what you might think of as a movement. And so much so that the Girl Scouts now have stem badges. Um, four girls inspired by Goldie Box. So those are a couple examples of biggie entrepreneurs and small entrepreneurs. But regardless of where you want to look as you start to look at it, you'll see the companies that matter the most matter because they designed dominated a category that matters.

They did something different. They weren't trying to just merely incrementally improve on what came before. They had the courage to stand on their own, to create new categories of products and services and built the companies to execute against that. And if you think about it, here's sort of another corollary. There's no such thing as a legendary company in a shitty category. A simple example for this is is Dell computers. Del. Once was a legendary company. They did design a new category, which was selling computers direct back in the late eighties and early nineties, when the personal computer was really beginning to take off is a category. The big players in the market. People like IBM and Compaq and others, um,

they sold their products through a distribution channel, Dell said. We're going to sell director customers over the phone. And then, of course, when the Internet became a thing, they did that as well, and they were the pioneer of that model. They designed that category and they sold ah, desktops, servers and laptops. Well, today, Dell is a $90 billion company. It's very well run. It does all sorts of stuff and it doesn't matter,

and the reason it doesn't matter is because none of the categories that Dell plays in matters. And so there is a point in time where Dell had one of the most powerful brands in technology. And today their brand is dusty. And most people would say, Oh, well, you know, they've done a shitty job of branding. What I would assert to you is no. The category makes the brand. And the reason del doesn't matter in spite of the fact that there are $90 billion company is they don't participate, never mind dominate any new technology categories that air forward leaning. So they're a great company with great products, and nobody cares. IBM has also become a company like that. This is the company that is the category designer of the information technology industry,

and it's a wonderful giant company. By all accounts, it's a pretty good place to work. By all accounts, IBM does a great job for their customers. Ah, and their partners, and they do impressive technology and so forth. And as tough as it is to say, IBM doesn't matter today, and the reason they don't matter is because again they are not pioneering any new forward leaning market categories of technology. They are viewed as somebody who leans back on it and at best is a systems integrator of other people's leading edge ideas, categories and technologies. And so IBM is a wonderful company, but it doesn't really matter. They don't matter in the way that Google matters in the way that Salesforce matters in a way that Amazon or Apple matters.

So categories make the brand categories make the company, and I would even assert you categories make your career. It's not okay to just be an accountant. You need to be a particular kind of accountant. And if your area of specialty and expertise matters than you matter, and if you're just a generic accountant, you're probably gonna have a hard time competing today. And so I research to you that companies and brands Onley matter if they dominate. Their category and category design is a new lens on business, and if you start to ah, play with the lens, you'll start to see categories everywhere. A simple example I like is dentists. Dentists intuitively understand that category comes first and brand comes second, so if you think if you if you if you're driving around and you noticed a sign for a dentist. What the vast majority of signs for dentists say is a big sign that says dentist and below it Sally Smith DDS.

Because dentists understand that first, you need to see that there a dentist and then second you see their name. If they said Sally DDS with a small font dentist, most people don't know what that means. So they put the category first and their name second, because dentists understand that categories make brands you And I think in terms of category, if I say to you Hey, I just heard about this awesome new car coming out. A typical answer would be, Oh, what kind of car is it? And when we asked that question, we're asking, what category is it? Um, the other day,

somebody asked me, Hey, would you like a piece of gum? I said, What kind of gum is it? That's a question around, you know? Is it bubble gum? Or is it? You know, um um ah, like breath mints? Come we as human beings put category first and brand second. There's been this huge explosion on the west coast of the United States over the last decade or so in what now is called craft beers and the category that's the most popular R I. P. A's Indiana India pale ales.

And and so today it seems like at least where I live. There's a new craft brewery that opens up every 15 seconds, and you can't have a successful craft brewery in California today if you don't have multiple I p A's, and then they brand, um um as something else, right? So one of my favorites, for example, is from stone Brewing in Southern California, and they have ah ah brand called delicious I p a. Right, another one of their brands I love this is a side note is called arrogant faster, But I digress. And so But first I'm looking for an I p a. Because if I like the brand, then I'm interested in the category.

If I don't excuse me, if I like the category, then I'm interested in the brand. I don't have Children. And so if you market, if you're Chrysler and you market a minivan to me, it doesn't matter what the brand is. I'm not gonna pay any attention. But if you're Ford and you market a muscle car to me. I am because I think muscle cars air cool. And if you think muscle cars air cool, you're probably interested in Mustangs category First brand second. And so I would ask you to start to play with this category lens and ask yourself, Why is this named what its name? The second thing I'd ask you to think about is, why is it valued the way that it values?

Ah, our eyes valued, you know it blows me away. One of my favorite examples is, um, a pair of high end sunglasses can cost 300 to $400 you can get a pretty good functional flat screen TV for 150 bucks. And so categories are also how we assign value to things. Categories are everywhere, and so I would assert I would. I would encourage you to play with the category lens. Start looking at what things are called the use of words and why they're called what they're called and how at the category level, things air differentiated one from another and you'll begin to see categories that play everywhere and then it leads you to the next. Ah, how which we'll talk about in subsequent episodes, which is the company that designs the category is best positioned to dominate it. And thats why category is the new strategy?

All right, we would like to thank the amazing folks at one life fully lived dot org This is the nonprofit Helping Your Dream plan and live your best life. Check out one The Number one Life fully lived dot org 11 85 design 1185 design dot com There is reason most legendary companies and brands walk through the doors of 11 85 design because they filled and design legendary brands in Silicon Valley. A. A podcast that I absolutely love called the brutal Truth about sales and selling by my buddy Brian Burns. He's fantastic is the sales guru to the, um with stars, checkem out brutal truth of sales and selling a book. I Want to Turn You On to written by my buddy Bruce Cleveland, who's also been a guest on my other podcast. His book is called Traversing Traction Gap on uh, he's mapped out a very powerful set of thinking for how start ups can avoid with common sort of pitfalls and get to escape velocity. It's in fantastic book and he talks about categories. His concept he calls market engineering check out traversing traction gap and the thought I'll Leave You With comes from my Angelo, who said I have learned that people will forget what you said. People will forget what you did,

but people will never forget how you made them feel. Thank you means the world to me that you invest some of your life with me. That's it. Thank you so much. Stay legendary and until we're together again, follow You're different.