Category Categories

Oprah Winfrey is not a brand. Oprah is a Black woman who was born into poverty in Mississippi to a single teenage mother who used her challenging and troubling childhood to inspire her to create a new category of television talk show that evangelized a more intimate, emotional, and confessional form of media. She did something different.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this audiobook is an actionable guide to creating massive differentiation in your business.

Category romance is a precise art. With such a small word count, writing the perfect category romance is a little like writing a haiku. But how do you write a book in 17 syllables? In Crafting Category Romance, two-time RITA™-nominated author of nearly 100 books Amy Lane describes the rules of engagement, traps to watch out for, and how to leverage common tropes to create conflict, craft a character, develop a plot, and leave readers with a happy ever after that's different every time - all in a tidy package.

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.

Category Pirates - Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole - walk listeners through arguably the most important aspect of going public: writing the S-1. If there was ever a way to measure public company readiness, the S-1 document would be it. Within the first few lines of a company’s S-1, you can immediately tell whether they are positioning themselves in the context of the past, or are educating investors on a different (and exponentially more valuable) future.

Almost all thinking is reflexive (having an unconscious “reflex” in response) versus “reflective” (taking a moment to consciously reflect on how the past may have created a preexisting mental model keeping you from considering a new and different future).

In 2005, a little book called Blue Ocean Strategy grew into a global best seller. With over four million copies sold and industry recognition as “one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written”, Blue Ocean Strategy changed the way many people thought about business. We tip our hats to the title, and the framing of the idea, because it is a legendary example of languaging. More than 15 years later, you will still hear people in business meetings referencing “blue oceans” and “red oceans”. But...there are a few problems.

Category Pirates — Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole — see a meaningful percentage of marketers, entrepreneurs, and executives trapped in what they like to call the "Brand Cult". These are professionals who have been taught the best (i.e., the most well known) brand wins. And this is a lie. The biggest brands in the world didn’t become successful because of their brand. They became successful by creating and dominating a new and differentiated category with which their brand became synonymous. Because categories make brands. Not the other way around.

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.

Some writers don’t want to think about the money side. The question of how to monetize as a writer, creator, and thought leader is a bit loaded—because it requires you to address a deeper question, first.

Business media “platforms” and social media platforms have a problem. The way content gets created, distributed, and monetized today is being radically transformed—and most people haven’t noticed yet. And up until now, creators have not been paid (fairly) for their work. Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this audiobook is the ultimate guide for creators who want to understand how to make the most of the changing media landscape.

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.

The life insurance industry stands at a pivotal moment. Consumer trust is eroding, many new technology entrants have failed, and the demands for innovation have never been more urgent. Maria Ferrante-Schepis offers a compelling “video tape review” of the industry’s last decade, enabling us to rethink what’s possible in a negative demand category.

The content marketing category is a $400 billion industry. And it’s estimated that by 2024, the content marketing industry will grow by another $270 billion, bringing the grand total to nearly $700 billion. But how much of the content being created (especially by enterprise companies and B2C companies) is actually worth reading? The truth is, most of it isn't.

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.

Christmas is a lightning strike for Christianity (not unlike how Salesforce created Dreamforce, their yearly conference). It happens once per year, and introduces the masses to the POV of Christianity ("Jesus died for our sins") without requiring any real religious participation. If you want to go to Christmas Eve mass, churches are open. And if you just want to Amazon Prime a bunch of gifts for your nieces and nephews and get drunk on spiked eggnog, God bless you!

The same way startups work hard to one day achieve a legendary liquidity moment and go public, the same can be said about individuals who achieve a certain level of autonomy and financial freedom in their personal lives. And in the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, it’s clear this desire for freedom is more desirable than ever.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this audiobook busts common product myths and shows how to make a place in the world for your product.

In 2016, Category Pirate Eddie Yoon wrote the seminal book on business growth, called Superconsumers. A Superconsumer is the kind of person who knows your category better than anyone else—and as a result, is willing to spend 30 percent to 70 percent more with you than other less enthusiastic customers. And in this “mini-book,” the pirates follow up with an equally groundbreaking discovery: A Super of one category is also a Super of nine others.

In 1973, Martin Cooper invented the cell phone. How? He started with a problem (the Chicago police needed an alternative to bulky two-way radios). He synchronized the magic triangle (product, company, and category design). He executed a lightning strike (a publicized call to his top competitor). And he won the category.