In Play Bigger (HarperBusiness, June 2016), Al Ramadan, Dave Petterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney explain how and why “pirates, dreamers, and innovators create and dominate markets.” Category design is one of the key concepts that they examine. What is it? “Category design is about creating a new space and ecosystem for an innovation. An innovation without category design wins you a Techcrunch award.

“Innovation with category design turns you into a powerful, enduring business. Disruption is a by-product of creating a new category that happens to suck the life out of an old category — the way Salesforce.com’s cloud-based software emasculated the on-premise CRM software industry. But plenty of great new categories don’t disrupt anything. Airing didn’t disrupt hotels. Hotels are doing fine. Disruption should never be a goal. Create something great, and it disrupts, well then you get the Disruptor merit badge.

“Category design is the discipline of creating and developing a new market category and conditioning the market so it will demand your solution and crown your company as its king.” More specifically, here are what specifically category design is and does:

o It drives the company’s strategy to become a category king.
o Involves product and ecosystem design.
o Is part of a company culture.
o Is about creating a powerful and provocative story that cause customers to make a choice.
o Is marketing, public relations, and advertising in combined/cohesive/collaborative focus

“Above all, category design is making all of these components work together, in lockstep, feeding off each other, so each action builds momentum for both the category and its king. In that sense, category is like a musical score for a symphony. Just as every part of the orchestra needs to play the same score together, every part of the company needs to execute category design together.”

Is our company a category king?