Showing results for "a pirate" in Advertising

One of the most common questions entrepreneurs and small business owners ask is, “how do I create a category if I’m not a heavily funded startup, or some massively successful company? How can someone like me create a category of my own?” This reveals maybe the single greatest benefit of category design: anyone can do it, at any stage of their life.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this audiobook explains why year-long marketing should not be your dominant focus, and explains the exponential benefits of mattering to your most loyal customers just a few times per year.

From early in life, we’re taught to compete in a preexisting game of comparison designed by someone else (listen to this sentence three times). And in doing so, we unconsciously submit to someone else’s rules. In business, this seems smart. Buy Google Ads for the keywords that indicate someone is already shopping and yell, “Pick me! Pick me!” The unquestioned rationale is: Demand exists, and if our business can tap into that existing demand, we will find customers—and customers lead to profits.

A small start-up based in Chicago came up with a radically different idea to help small businesses generate buzz, awareness, and customer acquisition. These digital coupons were called Groupons. Ten years later, Groupon has become a thing of the past, with a market cap of less than $1 billion.

Category Neglect doesn’t come from people being stupid or lacking sufficient data and resources to spot the headwinds and tailwinds of the future. It comes from a refusal to acknowledge which direction the wind is really blowing.

The Magic Triangle is the combination of product design, company design, and category design that produces legendary outcomes in the world of business. All three elements—company design, product design, and category design—work together and balance each other to exert great force on a company’s success and value. And the legendary, enduring companies get these three elements of company design, product design, and category design in such a state of synchronicity that they reinforce each other.