Category Design (and Redesign)

Category design is the intentional process of inventing, framing, or reshaping a market category to gain competitive advantage and establish your company as the category leader. Involvement includes identifying whitespace, naming the problem and category, setting category attributes, and orchestrating market, analyst, and press engagement. Redesign involves redefining established spaces to create new leader positions or shift narrative advantage. Category design remains the highest-leverage move in market strategy, with category kings capturing a majority of category value. However, it is necessary but insufficient. You must do all of the 5 Tenants of Market Engineering.