Businesses face tighter competition now more than ever. For a specific product, you’ll find plenty of brands available, struggling to be on top and wanting to become the standard or industry leader. That’s when category creation comes to play.
If you want to be on the front line, you must develop a product or new marketing category that embraces category creation. By doing so, you can expand your business and open new doors of opportunities more than you can imagine.
In this article, get a deeper understanding of category creation and how this business model can help you thrive, grow, and make your business successful.
What Is Category Creation?
Category creation refers to designing a new product, service, or marketing strategy that has never been used or launched in the market. Brands that can create a new product category can benefit from being the “first” in the industry or business niche.
The benefits of category creation are as follows:
- Position Yourself as Leader: Category creation redefines your business by establishing an entirely new market category. Once you have created a new market category, you should develop and execute it to position your business as the leader.
- Makes Your Brand: A new category builds a filing system, creating a priority network of your brand. By being the first one to offer a new product category, consumers will view your brand as a premier and exclusive provider, bringing your business in the spotlight.
- New Marketing Tool: Category design is an innovative, new marketing tool. It drives consumer interest or people who are always attracted to something new in the market, influencing others and spreading the news on blog sites, reviews sites, social media networks, and even word of mouth.
Category design also involves using innovative technologies and solutions to address long-time consumer complaints and needs. Lastly, it tackles creating new needs or wants that would appeal to the masses, resolving unnoticed needs and concerns.
Category Creation Tips for Growing Businesses
- Know the Signs That Category Creation Is Right For Your Business
In a Harvard Business Review article, companies instrumental in creating new categories had 53% incremental revenue growth, and incremental growth of market capitalization at 74%. Before you choose the category creation path, it’s important to know if this business strategy is appropriate for your business.
So, how do you know if category design applies to your business?
Check out these signals showing that your business can embrace category creation:
- Few or Zero Competitors: You can still dominate the market with a new category even if you find a handful of early-stage companies that address the same problem. With the right people, resources, and technology, you can outshine them and become the forefront.
- No Media Coverage: Even if no press or media outlet is covering your business, you can get support from early influencers who serve as your brand advocates.
- You Found Marginalized Buyers: You probably have realized some marginalized buyers that no other company is serving. Finding new inspiration for these underserved buyers can help you plan a good category design.
- Low Search Volume: If nobody seems to be searching to solve a problem, buying traffic can be difficult as compared to businesses operating in established markets. Introducing category design in your marketing can help more consumers to realize the importance of your brand or products and services.
- Small Niche of People Talking About It: If there are small communities, influencers, or consultants talking about a particular prospective product, service, or marketing strategy, you can dominate the market by getting insights from them.
- Brainstorm With Your Team
Brainstorming with your team should start by listing the possible prospective ideas for a new marketing strategy, product, or service. It should include knowing a possible source of cost-effective raw materials, tools, and equipment. That’s why, upon assessing the suitability of category creation for your business, it’s high time to brainstorm with your team to kickstart the process.
Remember that even for a startup business, creating new categories can help increase value and dominate a market along with operational benefits, including the following:
- Better access to funding
- More resources to attract top talents
- More market shares
- Higher valuation multiples
- Compartmentalize
Keep in mind that the majority of people may not understand or get your category design right away. This is because the human brain is wired to identify cognitive references when an original idea is perceived.
Also, your partners and investors might not fully understand the scope of your category design vision. That’s why it’s crucial to compartmentalize your vision into an already existing category.
Here’s how:
- Take Advantage of Prototyping: Prototypes are a resemblance of the final products. Prototyping services offer flexible solutions to help you explain your vision to your partners and investors before mass-producing a product that may work or become in-demand.
- Use Split Testing: Split testing or A/B testing involves creating two new ideas, products, or marketing strategies, whichever applies to your business, into two versions. This will help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of the subjects under testing.
- Audience Segmentation: Every customer is unique, but consumers also have similarities, For a successful category design, a business should be able to feel their pains. That’s when audience segmentation comes in.
Audience segmentation is a way to compartmentalize your vision and determine the target audience for your product or service. This involves gathering consumer feedback or testimonials, reviews, comments on social media, and consumer complaints about the phone, chat, or email through your customer service department.
- Category Design, Graphic Design, and Digital Marketing Compatibility
With digital technology, it’s a must to ensure that your graphic design, digital marketing, and category design are compatible. By keeping your audience engaged in your website through graphic design, you can better explain and market your new product or service.
In the same way, digital marketing can help you promote your brand with a category creation in place.
Conclusion
If you want to implement category creation for your business, you must first assess if this business strategy applies to your brand. Once it’s done, you have to brainstorm with your team to get their insights and start planning.
Compartmentalizing is an effective approach to find out the problems, gaps, or opportunities you can work on for category design. Also, don’t forget to consider the compatibility of category design to your website, app, and store graphic design and digital marketing strategies.
