Dave Peterson – författare

The founders of a respected Silicon Valley advisory firm study legendary category-creating companies and reveal 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.

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”— companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Uber, and IKEA—that give us new ways of living, thinking or doing business, often solving problems we didn’t know we had.

In Play Bigger, the authors assemble their findings to introduce the new discipline of category design. By applying category design, companies can create new demand where none existed, conditioning customers’ brains so they change their expectations and buying habits. While this discipline defines the tech industry, it applies to every kind of industry and even to personal careers.

Crossing the Chasm revolutionized how we think about new products in an existing market. The Innovator’s Dilemma taught us about disrupting an aging market. Now, Play Bigger is transforming business once again, showing us how to create the market itself.

In today''s world, it''s no longer enough to create great new products; rather companies now must create whole new categories that destroy old ones. Uber created a new personal transportation category and destroyed taxis and limos. Salesforce.com created a new category of cloud-base sales automation, dethroning the old CRM industry. Airbnb, Workday, Tesla and Netflix are all winning by creating entirely new business categories that destabilise old ones.The category is the new strategy.The conclusion: If you want to build a legendary company, you need to design and build a legendary category at the same time, and dominate it over time. Your company needs to be a Category King. And if you don''t design a Category King, you''re creating a failure. Drawing on examples from within and beyond our own practice, PLAY BIGGER shows both entrepreneurs and established enterprises how to define, develop and rule a category over time.