Category Pirates, the leading digital-first business publisher, announced that their first two full-sized books, “The Category Design Tool Kit” and “A Marketer’s Guide To Category Design,” successfully achieved number one status in multiple categories on Amazon.com at the same time on Monday, December 6, 2021.
“Category Design has emerged as the most powerful business skill on the planet,” said Category Pirates Co-Creator, Nicolas Cole. “Over the past 20 years, Category Creation 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.”
Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole—otherwise known as the Category Pirates—are thought leaders of Category Creation and Category Design thinking in the digital age.
What is Category Design?
Category Design is the management discipline of creating and dominating markets. It is a strategy used by entrepreneurs, executives, marketers, and creators to build business breakthroughs through establishing radical differentiation.
On average, category leaders earn 76% of the total value created in their market and have market capitalizations that are five to eight times higher than comparable high-growth companies. As a result, successful Category Designers are the people who earn the vast majority of the economic value created in a given market—and are the ones best positioned to make an outsized difference in the world.
Given the global success of Harvard Business Review articles such as “Why It Pays to Be a Category Creator” and “Category Creation Is the Ultimate Growth Strategy” (authored by Category Pirate, Eddie Yoon) and the first book on Category Design, “Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets” (Co-Authored by Category Pirate Christopher Lochhead), there has been a growing understanding in business that in order to have a meaningful impact, in order to “become known for a niche you own,” and in order to dominate an industry, you must create a new category for yourself (or redesign an existing one in your favor).
“The Category Design Toolkit”
In The Category Design Toolkit, readers discover 15 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—category design thinking matters.
In this book, people 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% of the market.
– The 8 category differentiation levers, and all the ways you can create a defensible moat around your business.
– How you can apply category creation & 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 & 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.
The Category Design Toolkit is everything people need to know in order to learn, practice, and master the skill of category design.
“A Marketer’s Guide To Category Design: How To Escape The ‘Better’ Trap, Dam The Demand, And Launch A Lightning Strike Strategy”
In A Marketer’s Guide To Category Design, people will learn:
– There is a new category of “human” in today’s world: Native Digitals (people under the age of 35 years old). And if you are a Native Analog, then all of your marketing efforts need to sit in this new context called, “For Native Digitals, the digital world is the real world.”
– Why so many marketers, entrepreneurs, executives, and even investors fall for The Big Brand Lie (falsely believing it’s the company’s “brand” customers care about).
– The “Better” Trap: why comparison marketing never works, and causes comparison-focused companies to fight over only 24% of the market.
– How to successfully execute a Dam The Demand strategy, stopping customers in the “old” world and moving them over to the new & different future you are creating.
– How to launch a Lightning Strike Strategy—and why “Peanut Butter Marketing” (spread out evenly throughout the year) is a guaranteed path to irrelevancy.
– What most marketers don’t understand about Black Friday, and why discount campaigns and coupons are a bad way to grow your business.
– And finally, the difference between content marketing that captures people’s attention and makes a difference versus content that goes nowhere.
About Category Pirates
Category Pirates is the leading authority on category design and category creation. We publish newsletters and books for the radically different—who want to see, design and claim the future.
Category Pirates’ newsletter is in the top 1% paid of paid newsletters on the Internet, and currently at charting at #7 in the subcategory of “business” on Substack. Category Pirates has published over 20 books with multiple books achieving #1 status on Amazon.com in multiple business, strategy, and marketing categories.
Eddie Yoon, Nicolas Cole and Christopher Lochhead are the Co-Creators of Category Pirates.
Contact:
Categorypirates@gmail.com
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