CTech's Book Review: An amazing playbook for designing a category and taking it to market

Gal Rimon is the Founder and CEO at Centrical. He has joined CTech to share a review of “Play Bigger” by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney. Here, he shares some of the lessons learned about becoming a Category King and maintaining the lead in industry.

Title: Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

Authors: Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney

Format: Tablet, Audiobook

Where: Home, Commute

Summary:

 

This is a practical textbook for founders, CEOs, and business leaders that would like to build or upgrade their business to a CATEGORY KING.

Category kings, such as Google; Uber; Salesforce; Netflix, take most of the revenue and profit dominating their domain.

The book is extremely descriptive and instead of providing the mere theory, it provides actionable playbooks for category designing.

If you read it with the guidelines of this website categorydesignadvisors.com, you'll have an amazing playbook for designing a category and taking it to market.

Important Themes:

 

The book starts with explaining why it is so important to define a category and to become its king together with practical examples.

Followed by the practical design steps: Discovery process; Problem/Solution; Marchitecture; Name; Company POV; Mobilization and the Lightning Strike(s) = Launch process.

One of the core elements is the POV - Point of View - which tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It tells the world why this category and the company creating it are DIFFERENT.

To build a clear POV, you need to frame the problem, quantify the problem, understand the ramifications, describe the vision for the future and the outcomes.

What I’ve Learned:

 

First, aim to be different over aiming to be better.

Second, defining a clear and real POV (point of view) about your business is so hard, but yet so rewarding.

Critiques:

 

Creating a category is virtually an impossible quest. One needs to educate the market and ecosystem, while it’s always easier and safer to follow a leader and answer a clear and pre-defined need.

Therefore, it's not for the faint-hearted. Having said that, one has to strive to create a small category (niche) and to dominate it.

Who Should Read This Book:

 

Entrepreneurs, CEOs, Marketing leaders, Business development, VCs.