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Category design is a business strategy in which a company creates a new market category, defines the problem that category exists to solve, and sets out to become its accepted leader, instead of competing for share in a category someone else has already defined.
Most companies live inside categories other people drew. They get compared with the same rivals on the same feature grid, and they win by being a bit cheaper or a bit faster. Category design tries to change the comparison itself, so buyers stop asking "which CRM is best?" and start asking a question only you were built to answer.
It's an appealing idea, and that's part of the problem. Plenty of companies announce a new category in a press release and change nothing else. A real category takes years, reshapes what a company builds and says, and for most businesses it's the wrong bet.
TL;DR
The term comes from the 2016 book Play Bigger by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney, who studied "category kings" such as Amazon, Salesforce and IKEA. A widely repeated claim that kings take 76% of their category's value no longer appears on any page the authors publish that we could open, so treat it as their claim, not a measured share.
The authors argue that new categories end up with one dominant company because of how buyers think: the first convincing answer becomes the anchor, and every later entrant gets judged against it.
Positioning argues you're the best choice in a category buyers already understand. Category design argues the buyer is asking the wrong question, so the competitor becomes the status quo instead of another vendor.
The core asset is a point of view that names a problem, explains why the old approach fails and frames a new category as the answer. Salesforce did this against installed CRM software, and Clay says it coined the GTM engineer role in 2023.
Most companies should own a sharp segment instead. The Play Bigger authors themselves say it often takes six to ten years to change the minds of buyers, which is a long time to fund a market that may not form.
If you do go ahead, the work runs in stages: publish the point of view, repeat it until the market uses your words, line up demand generation, ABM and outbound behind the same story, then defend the frame as followers arrive.
Where category design comes from, and what its authors claim
The phrase took hold with Play Bigger, published by Harper Business in 2016. The book's argument is that winning means defining a new market category, developing it and dominating it over time, rather than beating competitors at a game that already exists. They call the companies that pull this off category kings, and use Amazon, Salesforce, Uber and IKEA as examples.
A large part of the book borrows from the economist Paul Geroski's work on how new markets evolve. In an updated chapter excerpt on their own site, Ramadan and Peterson describe what they call the category lifecycle. Early on, the number of companies in a new space explodes as everyone scrambles to solve the problem. In the middle phase the number drops sharply as a king emerges and takes most of the economics. In the last phase the king dominates and the field stays small.
You'll often see this summarized with a precise number: category kings capture 76% of the value their category creates. The figure traces back to Play Bigger's own research on venture-backed technology companies. The page most articles link to for it now returns an error, and none of the authors' current pages we opened state it, so we treat it as the authors' claim from a dataset we can't inspect. The direction is plausible. The exact share is not something we'd put in a business case.
One king per category, and the buyer psychology behind it
Why would a market settle on one leader instead of several equal ones? The authors' answer is mostly about how people make buying decisions under overload, and it's the part of the book that holds up best.
In the same excerpt they point to anchoring, the tendency for the first piece of information to shape how we judge everything after it. The first company that convincingly solves a new problem becomes the reference point, and later companies get measured against it. They add choice-supportive bias, where people rate an option more highly because they already chose it, and a pull toward whatever the group seems to be choosing. Put together, these explain why a slightly better product can arrive later and still lose.
For a B2B seller this has a practical meaning. Buyers in a new category don't have a feature checklist yet. Whoever explains the problem first often writes the checklist, and the several people in a buying committee will tend to reuse the framing that reached them first, especially if a champion forwarded it.
Category design vs positioning
The two get mixed up because both are about how a company describes itself. They work at different levels, carry different risks, and ask different things of the rest of the company.
Positioning | Category design | |
|---|---|---|
The claim | We're the best option among the ones you know | The options you know are solving the wrong problem |
Who you compete with | Named rivals, on criteria buyers already use | The status quo: habit, spreadsheets, "the way we've always done it" |
What buyers search for | An existing category name | Nothing yet, until you teach them a name |
Who owns it | Product marketing | The founders and leadership, because it shapes product, hiring and pricing |
Risk | Low and incremental | High: it either reshapes the market or never lands |
Time to payoff | A few quarters | Years |
The ownership row matters most. A category is a business decision before it's a marketing message, because it changes what you build and who you sell to. A clever campaign for a category the product doesn't actually embody gets found out on the first demo.
Positioning is still the right tool most of the time. Sharpening how you compare with known alternatives in a category buyers already budget for is cheaper, faster and far more predictable. Category design is what you reach for when that comparison would misrepresent what you sell.
The point of view comes before the product page
A category doesn't come from a product. It comes from an argument about the market, which the Play Bigger authors call a point of view. A good one does three things: it names a problem buyers feel but haven't put into words, it explains why the current way of solving it is broken at the root, and it frames a new kind of solution as the obvious answer.
The chapter excerpt uses Salesforce to show how this works. In the authors' telling, Marc Benioff evangelized a problem (expensive client-server CRM installations that kept failing) and proposed a new answer, CRM bought as a service without installing any software. The competitor in that story wasn't a better installed CRM. It was the idea that CRM had to be installed at all.
The pattern shows up in tools many B2B teams use daily. HubSpot's own account of its founding starts with a shift in how people buy, buyers who didn't want to be interrupted by ads and wanted helpful information, and says the company was founded in 2006 to help businesses grow with inbound marketing. Closer to home, Clay states in its guide to the role that it coined the GTM engineer title in 2023, and the job of GTM engineering now has a name, job postings and a toolset built around it.
The point of view usually lives in something you publish over and over: a founder essay, a research report, a talk that gets given fifty times. That's why category design and thought leadership can't be run as separate projects. The essays are how the category gets argued into existence, and the most useful ones get forwarded around buying teams in Slack threads and DMs, which is dark social doing work you'll rarely see in a report.
Should you design a category at all?
For most companies, no. Owning a narrow segment of an existing market, defined by a tight profile of the companies you serve best, delivers much of the benefit of leadership (pricing power, word of mouth, being the default shortlist name) without paying to educate a market from nothing.
The cost of that education is easy to underestimate. In the chapter excerpt mentioned above, the Play Bigger authors write that it often takes six to ten years to change the minds of buyers and users. Few companies can fund a decade of teaching before the market starts searching for what they sell. A category that never takes hold leaves you explaining an idea nobody asked for, while a solid go-to-market strategy inside an existing category can keep winning deals the whole time.
A few questions sort a genuine case from wishful thinking:
When prospects describe you to a colleague, do they reach for an existing category name and then add "but not really"? If the old label keeps undercutting you, that's a signal.
Does your product solve a problem buyers can name, or one you'd have to teach them to notice first?
Could you fund several years of publishing, speaking and educating before the category produces predictable pipeline?
Would the product, pricing and hiring change if you committed, or only the homepage?
If the answer to the last question is "only the homepage", you want a new tagline, not a new category.
How a new category gets installed in the market
Categories don't launch on a date. They get installed gradually, through repetition, until buyers use your words to describe their own problem. In practice the work runs in roughly four stages.
Publish the point of view. Before any product marketing, the founders name the broken status quo and the new way clearly enough that the idea can travel without them in the room.
Repeat it everywhere for a long time. The same argument goes into essays, podcasts, research and conference talks. This is demand creation in the purest sense, which is why category design sits firmly on the creation side of demand creation versus demand capture: nobody is searching for the category yet. The sign it's working is hearing your language come back from prospects and analysts who never heard it from you directly.
Line up the whole go-to-market motion behind it. Demand generation content, account-based marketing aimed at the companies most likely to adopt early, and content-led outbound that opens with the point of view instead of a feature list should all tell one story. The common failure here is sales slipping back into old-category comparisons because that's what the battlecards still say.
Defend the frame. Once followers arrive, they have to use your vocabulary to be understood, which helps you as long as you stay the most credible voice on the problem. Each customer who adopts the framing makes it more legitimate, and the momentum becomes a GTM flywheel that gets harder for latecomers to stop.
Stage three is where many category plays stall. The founders believe the story, marketing publishes it, and then the CRM, the lead scoring and the outbound sequences keep sorting and pitching buyers by old-category criteria. A category has to show up in the systems sales works from every day, or it stays a slogan.
Recap
Category design is a bet that you can change the question buyers ask, so that the answer points to you. The Play Bigger authors make a strong case that new categories tend to crown one leader, and that the leader is often the company that framed the problem first. Their exact numbers are harder to check than their logic.
The work itself is less glamorous than the idea. It's a point of view argued for years, a product and company that actually match it, and a go-to-market motion disciplined enough not to slide back into feature comparisons. For most companies the smarter version is a segment they can own outright, and that choice deserves a hard look before anyone writes a manifesto.
When the frame does take hold, it changes the economics of everything downstream. Buyers arrive already convinced the old way is broken, the systems behind your sales and marketing motion work with that belief instead of against it, and the emails from your automated prospecting workflows land with people who already recognize the problem you named.
Nebor doesn't invent categories for clients. What we do is make sure the story reaches the CRM: segments and scoring built around the new frame, outbound that leads with the point of view, and reporting that shows whether the market is picking up your language, all set up in the client's accounts and handed over with notes on how each part works.
Frequently asked questions
What is a category king?
A category king is the company buyers see as the default leader of a market category, the name that comes to mind first and the standard every other option gets compared with. The term comes from the book Play Bigger, whose authors argue that new categories tend to settle on one king that takes most of the economic value, while the remaining companies split a much smaller share between them.
Why do most category design attempts fail?
Three reasons come up again and again. Companies declare a category instead of designing one, putting a new label on an old product without changing how the problem is framed. They give up after a year or two, just before the market might have started using their language. And they choose category design out of ambition rather than need, when owning a sharp segment of an existing market would have served them far better.
Is category design the same as category creation?
People use the two terms almost interchangeably. Where a difference is drawn, category creation means bringing a new kind of product or market into existence, while category design is the deliberate strategy around it: defining the problem, naming the category, aligning the company behind it and working to become its leader. You can create a category by accident. Designing one is a choice made on purpose.
How long does category design take?
Years rather than quarters. The Play Bigger authors write that it often takes six to ten years to change the minds of buyers and users, which matches how slowly markets adopt a new way of framing a problem. Early signals can show up sooner, such as prospects repeating your language on first calls, but a company should plan and fund the effort as a multi-year commitment before starting.
Who should own category design inside a company?
The founders and the leadership team, not marketing alone. A new category changes what the company builds, who it hires, how it prices and which customers it chases, so it has to be decided at the top. Marketing then carries the point of view into the market. When category design is handed to a campaign team on its own, the product and the sales motion rarely match the story being told.
Can a startup or small B2B company do category design?
It can, and early-stage companies have one advantage: their product, pricing and messaging are still flexible enough to be built around a new frame. The constraint is money and patience. Educating a market takes years of publishing and selling an idea before demand is reliable. A small company without that runway is usually better off dominating a narrow segment first and widening the frame once it has customers and cash.
How can you tell a new category is catching on?
Listen for your own words coming back to you. When prospects use your name for the problem on a first call, when analysts or journalists adopt it, when competitors start describing themselves in your terms, and when people search for the category name rather than your brand, the frame is taking hold. Tracking how buyers describe their problem in demo forms and call notes gives you an early read before revenue shows it.
Do you need to invent a new category name?
Usually yes, because buyers need a short label to search for, budget against and repeat to colleagues. The name should describe the problem or the new approach, not your product, so others can use it without sounding like they are advertising you. A name alone does nothing, though. Without a clear point of view and a product that matches it, a new label just confuses buyers who were already comparing you with something familiar.
Is category design the same as being first to market?
No. Plenty of first movers lost their categories to a company that explained the problem better and became the reference point buyers judged everyone against. What matters is being the first convincing answer in the buyer's mind, which comes from framing the problem clearly and repeating that framing until the market adopts it. Arriving early helps only if the company also does that framing work.
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