Chapter 2: Design Your Category (Strike Marketing Book)
How to create, not compete
Hey there!
This is the 3rd installment in my new upcoming book, “Strike Marketing.” As a founding subscriber, you get access to all the chapters as I write them.
Here’s what the Marketing Industrial Complex wants you to believe:
You need to consistently create content for at least 18 months.
You need to SEO your website.
You need to market on social media.
You need to implement a paid social media ads strategy.
And on and on. Death by a thousand marketing tactics.
That’s what they’ll have you do. Grind away, competing on their terms, playing their game, trapped in a category someone else already owns.
Repeating Christopher Lochhead’s admonition: The Marketing Industrial Complex wants you trapped in someone else’s game.
Category Design = unfair advantage.
When you design your own category, you don’t compete with other companies. You don’t try to be the number one company in an existing category. “Competition” - a word that has been drummed into those of us who live in capitalist societies since we were too young to remember - is eliminated in category design.
Category design is a paradigm shift. You don’t become “more competitive” or “beat the competition.”
You eliminate the competition.
Category Design is the last, great, business strategy.
The power of languaging
The Category Pirates, in their book “The 22 Laws of Category Design,” put it this way:
Category design is about the exponentially different. It’s about creating different futures by creating new and different business categories. Category design is not about competing. It’s about creating.
When you design a new category, you define a problem the market previously didn’t know could be solved. When you identify and market the problem, you define a new category. Your company then gets associated with the solution to that problem.
In his first book about category design, “Play Bigger,” Christopher Lochhead, with co-authors Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, and Kevin Maney, explained it perfectly:
Once the public understands the problem, people latch on to the most popular solution. Given all of the product and service choices people must make, it can get too burdensome to research every offering. So we pick the leader. Global networks, search engines, and social media allow everyone to quickly identify the top solution. Almost as soon as the problem - the category - is well understood, customers find the most popular solution and flock to it. Especially for digital products and services, there is no reason for anyone to settle for what they see as second or third best. Everyone who wants the best can get the best, instantly. The perceived best takes almost all the market share; second best manages to hold on to enough to keep going, and the rest get pretty much nothing.
Read that last sentence again: “The perceived best takes almost all the market share; second best manages to hold on to enough to keep going, and the rest get pretty much nothing.”
Think Coke vs Pepsi. Google vs Bing. McDonald’s vs. Burger King.
Why category kings/queens capture 76% of the market
The Category Pirates found that category queens (or kings) can capture 76% of the category economics, leaving their “competitors” to fight it out for the remaining 24%.
In other words, you capture the lion’s share of the market benefits of a category you own. This includes market capitalization, revenue, and market share. You also distinguish yourself from other so-called competitors.
By creating a new category, you’re not better, more efficient, cheaper, or more luxurious than companies you might look like on the surface. You’re exponentially different from others. You are so different that your company defies comparisons.
Making choices easier in a world of infinite options
In the capitalist west, we’ve come to believe that having unlimited options is a good thing. But it makes choosing between one option or another really difficult. We check the reviews. We ask our friends and family members. We read all the sales copy.
We research all the options, yet we still hem and haw about what to choose.
That’s where category design comes in. Category design helps make your customers’ overwhelming choices much easier. It helps them cut through the noise so you become the only viable solution to your customers’ unique problems.
Let’s look at a simple example: coffee. When you go to a new town on business or for vacation, you’ll probably get a hankering for some good coffee, like a cappuccino or a peppermint mocha. You might:
Do research on the best local coffee houses in town, read the four or five articles that come up on Google about the top 10 coffee shops in X town, or
Google “Starbucks near me.”
I do B, and I bet you do too. Why is that? Starbucks invented the high-end coffee house category in the United States, and they’ve done a pretty good job of staying on top.
I talk more about Starbucks below, but I think you get my point. When you design a category, and you maintain your leadership position in that category, you make your customers’ job of choosing so much easier. You resolve the paradox of choice.
Examples: Category design in action
Uber vs. Taxis
Before Uber, we all relied on taxis to get us around strange cities. We assumed we’d have to put up with the unreliability and unpleasantness of taxi service forever. Dirty vehicles. Surly drivers. The experience of my friend in New York perfectly illustrates this: he tried to catch a yellow cab, but when the taxi driver stopped to pick him up, my friend took a while to explain exactly where he wanted to go. The taxi driver was rude and impatient, and drove off without him.
Uber highlighted a chronic problem we thought we’d have to live with forever: dirty, unreliable taxis and moody taxi drivers. The emergence of Uber turned the word “taxi” into a negative word. Passengers on business trips now associate it with dirty vehicles and surly drivers.
Pfizer’s “Erectile Dysfunction” vs. “Impotence”
Pfizer renamed “impotence” as “Erectile Dysfunction,” which transformed something that men were as an identity, to something that men had as a condition. This simple reframing of the problem changed everything. Men were no longer “impotent” - they had a treatable medical condition.
Starbucks: Creating the Coffee House Category
Starbucks sells $6 coffee, whereas cups of coffee at a gas station will cost you about $1.50. Starbucks can’t be compared to anything that existed in the marketplace when it appeared on the scene in the 1980s.
At that time, in the United States, a coffee shop was a diner that sold coffee. And also pies, breakfasts, sandwiches, dinners, and more. You sat at the counter or a booth, and a server would take your order for a “BLT, apple pie, and a cup of coffee.”
A coffee house, in the Starbucks sense of the word, is not a traditional American coffee shop. It’s a new category.
Howard Schultz, upon joining Starbucks in 1982, went on a trip to Italy that profoundly influenced his vision for the coffee business in the United States. In Italy, Schultz observed the deep connection between Italians and their coffee bars. He was captivated by the vibrant social interactions and the integral role of coffee in Italian culture, noticing how coffee bars served as bustling community hubs throughout the day.
Inspired, Schultz returned to Seattle intent on replicating the Italian coffee bar experience in America. However, he faced resistance from the original Starbucks founders, who were reluctant to shift from their model (selling coffee beans and equipment) to a café style of business. So Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 to start his own coffee chain, Il Giornale. It quickly became successful and expanded rapidly.
In 1987, when the original Starbucks owners decided to sell, Schultz seized the opportunity to purchase Starbucks and transformed it into a coffee beverage seller, opening the first revamped store on Pike Street in Seattle. This marked the beginning of Starbucks’ meteoric rise, turning it into the largest coffee-house chain in the world. By the early 21st century, Starbucks had established a presence in many countries, operating around 37,000 stores globally.
The impact of Schultz’s vision is undeniable. Starbucks revolutionized the coffee industry, and the result is the explosion of coffee culture in the United States - and the rest of the world.
As a result of Starbucks’ explosive rise in popularity, there’s been a subsequent explosion of local coffee houses, all based on the high-end, gourmet coffee concept Starbucks started in the 1980s.
Nir-Yu: R.E.M.O.T.E. Intelligence
My client and outsourcing provider Nir-Yu, led by CEO and co-founder Luis Derechin, identified a previously unacknowledged problem: most outsourcing engagements end in disaster.
He named it and claimed it: The Offshore Team Deathtrap (the name of his new book). The deathtrap consists of a series of misconceptions and false expectations, represented by the following sentence: “Hire less expensive professionals in Latin America or Asia, and you can cut costs while growing your business.”
What companies didn’t count on were:
The cultural differences, which generated communications breakdowns.
The talent mirage, which paired apparently skilled professionals with companies that didn’t vet the talent sufficiently.
Cost overruns, which negated the savings of paying lower salaries.
And more.
With the R.E.M.O.T.E. Intelligence model, we helped Luis define a new way of outsourcing that allowed U.S. companies to outsource their entire team to Latin American, while creating a streamlined process that turned remote team members into core members of their company. The new, outsourced team contributed to the growth and profitability of the client company, while becoming fully integrated into its processes, culture, and mission.
Identify Your Superconsumers
Now that you understand why category design matters, let’s talk about how to actually design your category.
The first step: identify your superconsumers.
Who are the 10% that will drive 70% of your results?
Superconsumers are the 10% of your market that account for 70% (or more) of your sales. They’re the ones who experience the problem you’ve identified. They push your category forward. They become an independent sales army on your behalf.
In “The 22 Laws of Category Design,” the Category Pirates say your ‘supers’ are that small segment of your market who are obsessed with the problem and your solution. They’re the ones who bring 3 different types of wine glasses to a wine tasting. They’re the Harley riders that go to every motorcycle rally on the calendar, whether it’s at Daytona Beach, Austin, or Sturgis. They’re the ones that go to all the Taylor Swift concerts, own all her t-shirts and swag, and buy her CDs and vinyl records.
The superconsumer profile
Your superconsumers are superfans. They love your product, your brand, your company. But they also have a problem and a pain you are perfectly positioned to solve.
Your superconsumers drive value across five key dimensions:
Sales
They’re your biggest buyers. They spend more, buy more frequently, and have higher lifetime value than anyone else in your customer base.
Marketing reach
They amplify your message. They share your content, tag you in posts, and tell everyone they know about what you do.
Referrals
They send you customers. Not occasionally - consistently. They’re your unpaid sales force, making warm introductions and vouching for your credibility.
Reviews
They leave detailed, glowing reviews. They write testimonials. They create case studies. They become your proof.
Product development insights
They push you to be better. They tell you what’s missing, what could be improved, and what features would make your offering even more valuable. They’re invested in your success because your success is their success.
How to find and interview your superconsumers
Start by looking at your current customer base. Who fits the profile above? Who are your most engaged, most valuable, most vocal customers?
Then, interview them. Not a survey. Not a questionnaire. An actual conversation.
Ask them:
What were you struggling with before you found us?
What other solutions did you try?
What made those solutions fail?
How would you describe the problem to someone else?
What’s different now that you’re using our solution?
What would you tell someone who’s considering working with us?
These interviews will reveal patterns. Patterns in their pain. Patterns in their language. Patterns in what they value most.
Creating sour superconsumer avatar
Once you’ve interviewed 5-10 superconsumers, you’ll start to see the archetype emerge.
Who are they? What’s their role? What keeps them up at night?
What are they trying to accomplish? What’s getting in their way?
Document this. Be specific. The more clearly you can see your superconsumer, the more precisely you can design your category to solve their problem.
Uncover the Acute, Unsolved, Non-Obvious Pain
You don’t design a category in a vacuum. You design a category in response to an acute, unsolved, non-obvious pain your superconsumers experience. They’ve often been suffering from this pain in quiet desperation, believing they’d never be able to get relief.
This is the heart of category design: identifying a problem people have resigned themselves to.
What “Non-Obvious” means
Let’s define what “obvious” means first. Obvious refers to problems and solutions that are readily evident, that everybody knows about.
An example of an obvious problem with an obvious solution is: your company is not generating enough leads. The obvious solution would be to run more search ads, social ads, create more content, and optimize for Google.
On the other hand, a non-obvious problem is one that most business founders aren’t aware of. But once they know about it, the solution is obvious.
For instance, a non-obvious problem for a business person is that they haven’t designed a category.
The pain they didn’t know could be solved
The best category designers identify problems that people have accepted as unchangeable facts of life. These are pains that feel permanent, inevitable, just “the way things are.”
And then they show the market that these pains don’t have to be permanent at all.
Case Study: Chris Stanley and the Smart Publishing category
Take writing a book, for example. Business owners want to write a book to use it as a thought leadership vehicle. But it’s always been too overwhelming and time-consuming to sit down everyday to write 40,000 - 60,000 words, let alone edit it, publish it, and promote it.
Then Chris Stanley came around and designed the Smart Publishing category, and suddenly, books are within reach of busy founders.
In a week a business owner can write a Mini Book, while eliminating the fluff that often accompanies a regular sized book.
Chris calls this “The Big Book Lie,” the fact that you have to write a book that’s at least 40,000 words, or 200 pages long, and get it into airport bookstores and on the New York Times bestseller list.
Those of us who dreamed of publishing that one book we had inside us were resigned to the pain and grinding effort it would take to write a standard sized book.
But then Chris came around, pointed out the pain, and suddenly designed a new category.
Case Study: The unreliability of taxis before uber
When Uber came around, we relied on taxis to get us around strange cities. We assumed we’d have to put up with the unreliability and unpleasantness of taxi service forever.
We’d experienced it countless times: waiting on a street corner in the rain. Taxi drivers who didn’t know where they were going. Being told “the credit card machine is broken.” Dirty backseats. Rude service.
We knew it was bad. But we thought that was just how taxis were. We’d resigned ourselves to the pain.
Uber identified that resigned pain and created a category around solving it.
How to articulate the pain in your market’s words
Here’s the key: you need to articulate the pain in the exact words your superconsumers use.
Not in your words. Not in industry jargon. In their words.
When you interviewed your superconsumers, they told you how they described the problem. They used specific phrases, specific metaphors, specific complaints.
Write those down. Use those exact phrases.
Because when your superconsumers hear their own words reflected back to them, something clicks. They think: “Yes! That’s exactly what I’ve been dealing with! This person gets it.”
That’s when they start paying attention.
That’s when they start believing you might actually have the solution they’ve been looking for.
Name and Claim Your Category
After you’ve identified your superconsumers, and identified their non-obvious pain, the next step is the languaging.
Languaging is just the Category Pirates’ term for vocabulary. You create a new vocabulary for your category.
Because when you name the problem, you own the solution.
The power of languaging
Think about the term “The Marketing Industrial Complex.” That’s my languaging to describe the insidious machine that tells us we can’t market our company unless we follow their playbook.
Or Chris Stanley’s Big Book Lie. Or Pfizer’s Erectile Dysfunction, a renaming of “impotence” to “Erectile Dysfunction,” which transformed an identity, “I’m impotent,” into a condition, “I have ED.”
These are examples of languaging at work.
You name and claim the words that describe the problem, your solution, and your category.
Because he who controls the vocabulary, controls the industry, as Roy Smith, the Wizard of Ads, is often attributed as saying.
Naming the problem (what they’re suffering from)
Languaging starts with the market problem. When you identify a previously unsolved problem, you name - or rather rename - the problem in a way that sets you up as the hero for your customers who are experiencing this problem.
When Nir-Yu created the R.E.M.O.T.E. Intelligence category, they identified outsourcing disasters as an acute problem for US businesses. By coining the term “Offshore Team Deathtrap,” they immediately alerted potential outsourcing clients that they could be diving headfirst into shark-infested waters.
The emergence of Uber highlighted a chronic problem we thought we’d have to live with forever: dirty, unreliable taxis and moody taxi drivers. Uber didn’t just solve the taxi problem - they reframed it entirely as a “ride-sharing” opportunity.
Naming the solution (your category)
But languaging is more than just reframing the problem. It involves coining a new term for your category.
Uber ushered in the term “ride-sharing.”
HubSpot coined the term “inbound marketing.”
Salesforce coined the terms “Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)” and “Cloud Computing.”
Chris Stanley coined “Mini Books” and “Smart Publishing.”
I coined “Strike Marketing.
Creating the vocabulary for your category
The next step in the language process is inventing new vocabulary to describe everything associated with your new category.
HubSpot introduced “Attract,” “Delight,” and “Engage” as terms to describe their inbound marketing flywheel.
Starbucks introduced the terms “Tall,” “Grande,” and “Venti” to describe small, medium, and large coffees, which enabled them to charge a lot more for a cup of coffee than the local 7-11.
With the introduction of “nearshore outsourcing” several other terms entered into the outsourcing vocabulary:
Nearshoring (a variant of nearshore outsourcing)
Cultural affinity (referring not only to the time zone advantages of nearshoring, but the cultural similarities of Latin American companies with U.S. clients vs. South Asian companies)
Geographical proximity
Examples of Effective Category Naming
The best category names are:
Descriptive but not obvious
“Inbound Marketing” tells you it’s about attracting customers in, vs. “outbound” pushing messages out
“Nearshore” tells you it’s geographically close, contrasting with “offshore”
Memorable
“Ride-sharing” is easier to remember than “on-demand private transportation”
“Mini Book” is simpler and more appealing than “short-form business book”
Own-able
You can claim it. It’s yours. No one else is using it yet.
It’s specific enough that when people hear it, they think of you first.
Your category name should make people stop and think: “Wait, what’s that?” And then, once you explain it: “Oh! That makes total sense. Why hasn’t anyone done this before?”
Design Your Category Framework
Now you have everything you need to design your category:
The superconsumers you’re targeting
The non-obvious pain you solve
The languaging that describes the problem and the solution
It’s time to put it all together into your category framework.
Your category POV (Point of View)
Your category Point of View is your thesis about the market. It’s your contrarian position. It’s what you believe that others don’t.
HubSpot founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan laid out exactly how to carry out inbound marketing strategies in their book, “Inbound Marketing.” and through the many writers and thought leaders who joined HubSpot and contributed to their blog, videos, courses, and their conference, Inbound.
The Category Pirates have written dozens of Mini Books and traditional books about category design, and describe the framework in their iconic Substack, through their Category Design Academy, and with a series of AI Agents they’re developing to help burgeoning Category Designers carry out their mission.
Chris Stanley describes his Smart Publishing framework through his Mini Book series and his Smart Publishing Academy.
Your category POV should answer:
What’s broken about the current way of doing things?
What’s the better way?
Why now?
What becomes possible when you adopt this new approach?
The contrarian position that makes you different
Your category framework needs to challenge conventional wisdom.
If everyone else says you need to “create content consistently for 18 months,” you say you can compress 12 months of marketing into one week with a Summit Strike.
If everyone else says you need to write a 40,000-word book to be taken seriously, you say a Mini Book is more powerful because it eliminates fluff and gets to the point.
If everyone else says you need to offshore to Asia for the lowest cost, you say R.E.M.O.T.E. Intelligence gives you better results because it offers a systematic process of integrating right fit remote workers into the fabric of your company.
Your contrarian position is what makes people lean in and listen. It’s what makes them question their assumptions. It’s what makes them think: “Hmm, maybe there is a better way.”
Putting it all together: Superconsumers + pain + languaging
Here’s how it comes together:
Superconsumers: Second Act Founders - Gen X and Boomer entrepreneurs launching their next venture, with decades of expertise but no time to waste on the marketing slow burn.
Acute, Unsolved, Non-Obvious Pain: They’ve resigned themselves to the belief that effective marketing requires 18+ months of consistent content creation, massive ad spend, or dancing on TikTok - none of which fits their style, timeline, or budget.
Languaging:
The problem: “The Marketing Industrial Complex” - the machine that tells you you can’t succeed without their playbook
The solution: “Strike Marketing” - compressing 12 months of marketing into strategic moments of concentrated impact
The framework: Category Design → Startup Book → Summit Strike → Viral Genius Cascade
Category POV: Instead of grinding away in someone else’s game, you design your own category and use strategic strikes to accelerate adoption. You become the category queen (or king) by identifying non-obvious pain, creating new language, and orchestrating moments that shift perception in a week instead of years.
Contrarian position: The slow burn doesn’t work for founders who are short on time and rich in experience. You don’t need more content. You need better positioning and strategic timing.
Testing your category design with your market
Once you’ve designed your category framework, you need to test it.
Go back to your superconsumers. Share your POV. Walk them through the framework.
Do their eyes light up?
Do they start asking questions?
Do they say things like “Oh my god, yes! That’s exactly what I need!”?
If so, you’re onto something.
If not, refine. Adjust your languaging. Sharpen your contrarian position. Make sure you’re articulating the pain in their exact words.
The market will tell you when you’ve nailed it.
And when you nail it, everything changes.
Because you’re no longer competing. You’re creating.
In the next chapter, we’ll talk about how to codify your category POV by writing your Startup Book - the manifesto that turns your category design into a rallying flag for your movement.