Welcome to another edition of the Play Bigger newsletter. Today we’re making like the moody teenagers we are (Play Bigger officially turned 13 this year!), as we take aim at one of the biggest questions our companies and readers ask us: Why doesn’t anybody get me?! 

So put on that angsty emo LP you’ve been saving and get ready as we:

1. Explore the financial perils of being sort of like something else
2. Look deep into the soul of a company who found their inner category (and $billion market cap)
3. Get preachy with a technique any company can use to break through and get credit for, you know, the thing you ACTUALLY DO! 

Let's get into it...

1. You Are Not What People Say You Are!

At the risk of sounding all Oprah-ish (who, by the way, is an amazing category designer), you are so much more than what people think you are. And that’s usually, in our experience, because people are putting you into a category you really don’t belong in. Just because you have some features and some benefits that resemble some other category doesn’t mean that category can sufficiently define you - or that it should. 

And yet, so many founders we talk to come to us with that issue. Heck, we even devoted a chapter to it in our latest ebook. 

Here’s the thing …

There’s a difference between finding product market fit and rejecting the premise of a category.

There's a school of thought that tells you to swallow your pride and listen to what the market is telling you. They don’t want your vision. They don’t want your potential. They want this one specific thing and you should double down on it. 

Wrong. Dead wrong. 

If we had an embedded newsletter buzzer we’d be smashing it hard right now.  

People are putting you into an existing category - they don’t know any better and that’s why they can’t see your vision. They don’t have a pocket in their brain for you to slip into, and you have to go somewhere or chaos ensues, so they slip you into the closest thing they can find. AND MAKE YOU INTO SOMETHING YOU ARE NOT. 

The only options you have in this case is to: (1) accept the premise, and optimize everything about your company and product to COMPETE in the status-quo of that category fighting for table scraps (just 24% of the category economics); (2) reject the premise, and endeavor to frame a NEW PROBLEM, give people NEW WORDS and an entirely NEW CATEGORY of solution, with rules you make. 

If the problem you solve is sufficiently costly - and therefore valuable if solved - then you’ll create that pocket in your audience's brain. And you’ll give them the tools they need to - finally - SEE WHAT YOU SEE! 

2. For The Last Time! Qualtrics is NOT SURVEY MONKEY ON STEROIDS

How infuriating has it got to be to create an incredible suite of market research tools, different from any of the other products out there, only to be told you’re basically just like them. That was the problem Qualtrics faced when we started working with them back in 2015. Survey Monkey on Steroids is how many prospects and customers characterized Qualtrics’ offerings - and they indeed confirmed with us it WAS infuriating!

Predictably, deal value from sales teams was about what you’d expect for a survey: a few tens of thousands a pop, with episodic spending that could fluctuate wildly. 

Qualtrics did so many things right in their category design, but in the context of this newsletter’s focus, by defining a clear problem, POV and blueprint, they gave their customers and prospects a new mental model for how to think of them. 

Not as Survey Monkey on steroids, but as an Experience Management platform closing a costly experience gap built on a continuous management model. Which moved them from selling surveys - where the existing market kept trying to place them as a company - to harnessing an entirely new type of data called X data, or experience data, that fueled an entirely new experience economy. As a result, the full power of Qualtrics’ product portfolio became much more apparent, kept growing with a robust innovation engine, and generated average contract sizes that were 10-20x what they were before the category lightning strike. 

Qualtrics didn’t accept the market’s definition, so they went out and designed their own. 

And you can too …

3. How To Find Yourself: Category Design Take Home Edition

Step 1: Identify who has the problem you are trying to solve 

HINT: Think bigger than where the current market is. Qualtrics WAS solving a market research problem, but NOW they’re solving a CEO problem (realizing returns in an experience economy!) 

Step 2: Figure out what problem they have, can’t solve, but REALLY want to if they could

This is hard work, because if the problem was obvious somebody else would have realized it. In the Qualtrics example, it took recognizing that this wasn’t about the lower order problem of generating high quality data, this was the higher order issue of being successful in an experience economy. High quality data is important, but table stakes. Solving the experience gap needs high quality data, but more importantly, it needs the application of that data to manage experience.. 

Step 3: Architect the solution 

This is the part where most people start marshaling existing products into a new kind of solution. That’s important, but not sufficient (notice a theme yet?). In this step, you have to think deeply about what it would take to SOLVE THE PROBLEM, sketch out the solution and then figure out how all the existing products fit with it, what’s missing, and what’s no longer needed. 

Step 4: Name it!

People want to solve single minded problems with single minded solutions, and that’s exactly what the category name does. But don’t overthink it, you’re going to fill the category name with meaning over time, it’s unlikely it will be perfect from day one. 

Step 5: Put it all together in a POV 

Congratulations, you’ve got the raw ingredients for a new category. Now you need to mix it all up into a unified POV that: sets the context; frames the problem and its costs; outlines the solution, how the components work together and what it’s called; and delivers positive outcomes for a customer. 

Step 6: Let your category FLY 

We call this the lightning strike and mobilization phase at Play Bigger. The idea is to get the company you work for aligned behind the category, and then bring that category to your core audiences in an inescapable “lightning strike” moment. Forget about peanut butter marketing with budgets spread thin throughout the year, you’re going to demand attention with a short but inescapable burst of marketing, sales, events and product news. Your audience will hear about the problem over and over until they realize they’d be fools not to solve it. 

Share Bigger

If you found this newsletter useful, spread the love and invite other big thinkers you know to join the newsletter community! 

Listen Bigger

We know what you’re thinking, listening to people talk about how nobody gets us would be amazing! And that’s exactly what we’re doing this week on the Category Creation Labs podcast. If you liked what you read in today’s newsletter, listen in for even more detail, case examples and tips for implementing category design in your organization. 

Final Word

When people don’t see your potential, you don’t realize it. But leaving that up to markets is a losing game, because they’re set-up to categorize you into what they already understand. The only way to break out is to give them a new mental framework that matches the potential of your vision. And that is exactly what Category Design is for. For more information check out www.playbigger.com 

-The Play Bigger Team