How CMOs Kill Startups
Most marketers market.
In existing market categories.
They are trained in a comparison game. And when two people say, “I’m the best,” by definition one is lying.
Making it worse, when you’re marketing, the game you’re playing is a game invented by someone other than you. They set the agenda in the minds of the category. Not you. They frame the problem. They educate the world on how to solve the problem and what the product or service is worth. So, you will always be compared to “them.”
You can’t win competing in an existing market.
Ever.
Instead, startups need to design their own market category. Become known for a niche you can own. That way, others will follow you. Others will be compared to you versus you being compared to others.
That’s a good thing.
Startups need a category designer. And the chief category designer MUST be the ceo.
Now, a CMO can help a ton if she/he is schooled in category design. But a CMO who doesn’t know how to design and dominate categories will kill a startup.
Because if the CMO doesn’t know any better, they will position the company to compete in an existing market category. And that is a sure fire way to commit corporate suicide .
Allow me to explain.
The most legendary companies don’t just invent something to sell us. They are not making products or services that just incrementally improve on whatever came before. They focus on the exponential value of what makes them different.
They don’t do better.
They break and take new ground. They are unique. Original. New. They are different.
But, to many startups fail to find their place in the world. Because most innovators, entrepreneurs, executives, VCs and CMOs focus on two things:
Designing a legendary product and
Designing the company (and business model) to deliver the product
They believe in their soul that the best product wins. They believe in the best product strategy so deeply, they never question it. Like they don’t question gravity.
As a result, leaders with this mindset believe that the secret to success is simple. Just show as many people as possible their new “carbadigulator” and the world will beat a path to their door. They market.
These are the “build it and they will come” people.
Category design is the discipline of creating and monetizing new markets in a massively noisy world. Category design is about establishing your own niche by educating a market to think about a problem and solution in exactly the way you want them to.
Many of the elements of category design have existed for over a century. In fact, many of the greatest innovators instinctively knew that the path to success was in teaching the world to think a particular way, about a problem ad therefore a solution, not just offering them a product and hoping they’d “get it”.
As a result, the greatest innovators and entrepreneurs are category designers who do three things:
- Design a legendary product
2. Design a company (and business model)
3. Design (or re-design) a market category
Henry Ford knew he had to teach the world why the horse-less carriage mattered before people would buy his new category of transportation.
Clarence Birdseye had to make the case that frozen food — as distinct from fresh food and canned food solved a problem they didn’t know they had — — how to eat fresh tasting vegetables in winter. Once the world agreed with Clarence’s problem, they fired up their horse-less carriage, drove to the grocery store and demanded frozen food.
Spanx founder Sara Blakely established “shapeware” as a whole new space and was able to distinguish herself in the mega-crowded undergarment market and build a billion-plus valued category king from nothing.
And Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff used his “no software” point of view (POV) to educate enterprise software buyers about the evils of “on-premise” software and the virtues of a new category called “cloud computing.”
In Silicon Valley category design has been used by savvy CEOs like a secret “black art” as a weapon to out-smart overly product centric competitors. Category design is emerging today in much the way engineers embraced product design in the 1980s to make sure individual products had the best chance of succeeding — of beating the odds.
In the early-2000s, companies adopted experience design — a discipline a step up from product design, developed as a way to make sure the mix of hardware, software and usability together gave the user the best experience possible. Experience design is yet another way to improve the odds of winning in a nutty marketplace.
It is a broad, deep discipline that impacts every part of a company and its leadership team. Category design is a strategy for aligning the whole company to become the leader in a giant new space that you’re the creator of.
Category design is about playing the game of your own creation — not someone else’s.
Category design is about becoming the category queen/king and introducing the world to whole new ways of thinking, living, or working and earning the massive economic reward for doing so.
That’s why startups need a category designer to work with the CEO and the entire executive team.
And if that’s the CMO great. But the last think a startup needs is a traditional marketer doing traditional marketing and branding.
