Buyer Focused Category Creation

Creating and owning a category is hard and often elusive. Defining the category and your position as creating and leading it can seem like a daunting and insurmountable objective. One way to think about breaking through is to focus on the who, why, and what of your ICP — not just your ICP as a company but your ICP as a buyer.

Buyer personas have been around for a long time. They aren’t a new concept, but using the buyer as the crux of creating a category is underutilized or incorrectly applied. Creating a category driven by your buyer ICP is different than a typical buyer persona because you will be stretching the buyer to a place they have never thought about or been around the problem you are solving for them, and how you are doing it. This isn’t about offering the buyer ICP a competitive alternative to a known situation. It is about providing the buyer an entirely new and different way to solve a problem, and in many cases, a problem they didn’t know could be solved.

To be clear, category creation isn’t about coming up with a new tagline or campaign for a highly competitive scenario that a buyer will see right through. Creating a new category for a buyer opens their eyes to a new way of doing something. It is like giving the buyer a prism to look through that alters how they see things.

Creating and leading a category has broad elements. Still, if the execution remains too wide, it might be too abstract for buyers to engage and purchase. Category execution has to be both at the market level and at the buyer level. A winning category has to be aspirational and actionable. Aspirational enough to be intriguing to gain visibility about a new and better existence, and actionable enough that a buyer can make a purchase decision quickly and easily. The balance between a category’s market aspiration and a buyer’s actionability is one of the most challenging aspects of category creation and execution. In creating a category, you must work from both market and buyer perspectives to have them intersect. A category must end up big enough to be worth creating, while making sure it speaks to the individual circumstances of buyers. A category disconnected from the buyer will be a lofty exercise that doesn’t produce any tangible results.

Creating a category you can own isn’t a shiny new campaign; it’s giving buyers a new way of thinking about and solving a problem they may not even have known they had.