Showing results by author "Christopher Lochhead" in All Categories

The how-to playbook for start-ups and established companies on 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.

Whether you are a writer, creator, entrepreneur, executive, public speaker, investor, or industry thought leader, Snow Leopard is your guide for becoming known for a niche you own.

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".

Why do some writers and creators become known for a term, a phrase, or even an entire category, while others (talented as they might be) fade away? Because the most memorable writers and creators become known for a niche they own. And, more importantly, they invented new language to help them show the world how and why they are different.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this “mini-book” is a goldmine of mental pivots and actionable insights that will help you cut through the noise of your industry and become a voice of thought leadership at scale.

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.

This book is for a very small percentage of business people. You see, most people in business are not trying to use Category Design to create a new category that changes the future and generates exponential new value. Instead, many people in business are trying to “not get fired.” Many people want to go to work, make a contribution, and go home.

A mediocre category designer will beat a world-class marketer every day of the week. The reason is because all marketing sits within a context. "He or she who frames the problem owns the solution." Without this context—without a category—your marketing becomes nothing but screaming, shouting, and pitching customers with deals, discounts, and other short-term tactics in the hopes of landing a sale.

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 “mini-book” shares unique insight into what it takes to become a thought leader and successfully build a unique and differentiated category.

Ninety percent of what we’ve been taught about entrepreneurship, business strategy, and marketing is wrong. Without a differentiated POV, you are just like everyone else. No matter how cool, clever, or expensive your branding is. Short, sweet, and to the point, this is an audiobook for how you can attract customers, clients, fans, and followers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.