Play Bigger

How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

By: Play Bigger LLC, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

The founders of a respected Silicon Valley advisory firm study legendary category-creating companies and reveal a groundbreaking discipline called category design.

Winning today isn’t about beating the competition at the old game. It’s about inventing a whole new game—defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time. You can’t build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you’re going to lose.

In this farsighted, pioneering guide, the founders of Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger rely on data analysis and interviews to understand the inner workings of “category kings”— companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Uber, and IKEA—that give us new ways of living, thinking or doing business, often solving problems we didn’t know we had.

In Play Bigger, the authors assemble their findings to introduce the new discipline of category design. By applying category design, companies can create new demand where none existed, conditioning customers’ brains so they change their expectations and buying habits. While this discipline defines the tech industry, it applies to every kind of industry and even to personal careers.

Crossing the Chasm revolutionized how we think about new products in an existing market. The Innovator’s Dilemma taught us about disrupting an aging market. Now, Play Bigger is transforming business once again, showing us how to create the market itself.

Just what we needed

As a software founder with an engineering background short, simple and effective positioning doesn't come naturally to me.

Play Bigger helps with that but so much more. As the authors chronicle (with data) the best way for secondary players in a market category to successfully compete with the leader isn't a matter of having tfeatures, processes or sales teams. It's by fundamentally altering the narrative - or defining a new category.

The book covers both the strategic and tactical steps to define and weaponize the new category, from identifying the problem, creating a category definition, aligning your organization around it and deploying it into the market.

Highly recommended for entrepreneurs, marketers, brand managers and company leaders.

Eeeeepic!!

Unreal. So stoked. So blown away all of this is in a book!!! And so fun to listen to. Absolutely gratefully and excited.

EYE OPENER

"The Zed", pay close attention, they are greater in number than we think. New Top 5 book!

I’ve read/listen to this 5 times in the last 2 weeks

This book is everything. I’m excited to apply what I’ve learned in this book to the business I’m building

Inspirational

I thought the book did a great job of showing that in business, you either innovate or die.