Christopher Lockhead
Appearances
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
If you get category right, once people see something, they can't unsee it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
You can build a legendary company business model. Uh, but if you don't have a category, there is nobody that's going to buy it. So that's kind of problem one. Problem number two is if you look at most new, whether it's a startup or an innovative new product that is trying to pioneer an innovative new category from an existing company, the same dynamics are true.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
If you get category right, once people see something, they can't unsee it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
I guess the big aha is, you know, here's a simple one that that I like that tends to resonate. If you want to sell Bibles, there's got to be Christians. And so what most people do is they shout, look how great my Bible is. Legends spread the religion. And in the HBR research that I mentioned, we discovered this incredible thing.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
76% of the total value created as measured by market cap or valuation goes to the company that dominates the category. And so the aha here is categories make the brand. Google has a legendary brand because they dominate a category called search.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
When they take that legendary brand and they slap it on a category that they're not designing, aka social networking, they have their ass handed to them, in this case by Facebook. And so most companies believe they can win by screaming their brand. Look at us, look at us. Aren't we awesome? Aren't we awesome? Brands are about us. Categories are about customers.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
And so legends actually market their category. And in so doing, there's this other interesting thing that happens. Prospects, customers, consumers, the only company they've ever seen market the category is the category queen. So when you're the one evangelizing the category, the market, people in the market assume you're the leader because that's what leaders do.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
Non-leaders, that is to say followers, compare themselves to others. Take the Pepsi challenge. Pepsi tastes better than Coke, right? And when they do that, they're telling the market category, Coke's the leader. And so the only companies that consumers ever see attacking and comparing themselves are are by definition not the leaders, not the category queens and kings.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
And so if you want to be perceived as the company that's designing and dominating the market category, evangelize the category.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
At a high level, the companies that really break through, the companies that change the future, the companies that are worth the most going forward, they really get three things right at the same time. We call it prosecute the magic triangle. And what that means is they get company design. business model, culture, distribution, all of those things. They get product design.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
So do we have a truly breakthrough product that solves a unique problem in a completely differentiated way? And they get category design, right? So product, company, and category And if you get all three of those right at the right moment in time, that's how you get Airbnb. That's how you get Zoom. That's how you get, you know, pick your breakthrough company.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Best of Right About Now: World class Business Advice for Entrepreneurs
And, you know, based on our research, based on our experience, based on my experience of doing this for over 30 years, it really is equal parts of those three. The one addition I'd say there, Ryan, is of those three, there's one that is a single point of failure and that's category. Cause if there's no market, there's no marketing that you can get a, you can build a legendary product.