The Category Design Toolkit: Beyond Marketing

15 Frameworks for Creating & Dominating Your Niche

By: Category Pirates, Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, Nicolas Cole

Narrated by: Jason DeFillippo

Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

Are you ready to master the most powerful business skill on the planet?

Over the past 20 years, category creation and category design has gone from being a little-known "positioning" secret from advertising legends like David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Al Ries, Jack Trout, Gary Halbert, and more, to now becoming the single most in-demand skill among business leaders, Fortune 500 executives, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, marketers, and even the next generation of digital creators.

Why?

Because the business world is starting to wake up and realize branding comes second to category design.

No meaningful category?

No meaningful company.

Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole—otherwise known as the Category Pirates—are the leaders of category creation and category design thinking in the digital age. And in The Category Design Toolkit, they walk listeners through 15 absolutely mind-altering frameworks for how to see business, life, and the way people organize information into "categories" in their minds. Are you a B2B enterprise software company? Do you sell plastic widgets on Amazon? Maybe you're a small business owner, a biotech entrepreneur, or a YouTuber. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do. In order to have a meaningful impact on the world, in order to become known for a niche you own, and in order to dominate your industry in a way that separates you from any and all competition, you must create your own category.

Which means you must learn the skill of category design.

In this book, you will learn:

• How to objectively measure whether you and your company are creating a new category versus competing in someone else's (existing) category.
• How to prosecute The Magic Triangle: product design, company/business model design, and category design.
• How to find your superconsumers, and leverage superconsumer data to discover new potential categories.
• How to engineer a category breakthrough (even if you think your industry is "too saturated" or "all the good ideas are taken").
• The importance of being a missionary versus a mercenary—and why mercenary entrepreneurs and executives unknowingly compete over 24 percent of the market.
• The eight category differentiation levers, and all the ways you can create a defensible moat around your business.
• How you can apply category creation and category design principles even as a small "e" entrepreneur or local business owner.
• How category design can also be applied to your career (and why you should aim to become known for a niche you own, not "build" a personal brand).
• What happens if you neglect your category—and how to rage category violence industry leaders who make this mistake.
• How to write a legendary S-1 and raise hundreds of millions (even billions) of dollars in your company's IPO by making a case for the future growth of your category (which you created and designed).
• Why "Blue Ocean" isn't what you are looking for. And if you want to truly create a category of your own, you should execute a No Ocean Strategy.
• This book is everything you need to know in order to learn, practice, and master the skill of category design.

©2021 Category Pirates (P)2023 Category Pirates

Great Stuff for Entrepreneurs

This comes with good information which Category Pirates always put out. I am sold on this philosophy, particularly because I have first experience designing my own company. Only thing holding it back is that it is recycled content, which they said they do in their newsletters, since not everyone consumes the same content. Since I'm a Category Pirates super consumer, though, the information may be redundant, but I love these guys drilling the philosophy into my mind.

Hateful book with no new information if you’ve read Blue Ocean Strategy

This book refers to Christians and anyone who questions LGBT ideology as “diseased people” in Chapter 8. I got the book because the description made it sound different from Blue Ocean Strategy, but it’s not. They use the same examples you’ve already heard if you’ve read any business books like this, and have the same premise of creating a new market, just described in a different way.

The only new thing I noticed in this book is that they recommend AGAINST creating a MVP, according to the book you should just go all in. Unfortunately this is terrible advice, I doubt the writers have ever worked on a startup, because if they did they’d know why MVPs are necessary. MVPs prevent wasting large amounts of time and money on a product no one wants, which happens more often than not.