My son Owen is a high school club volleyball player. While he isn’t near the tallest, at almost 5 ft 10in and still growing, he definitely is the giant of our house. And his height DEFINITELY comes from Mom’s size. Owen plays setter. Setter is, as I have learned, the quarterback of the team. The setter gets more “touches” than any other player, and while the hitters get most of the glory, without a good set, there is no ball to kill.
What in the heck does this have to do with Category strategy? Well, let me explain a bit more about Volleyball teams. The typical squad has about 12 or so players. Of those, two are typically setters, maybe three. This depends on whether the team is playing a 5-1 or a 6-2 rotation. Without getting into the gory details, the first number is the number of hitters that rotate around, the second number, the number of setters. So if the coach plays a 5-1, only one setter plays, and usually they will roster just 2. In a 6-2, two setters play and you might have 3 on the roster. You see, in competitive volleyball, you play a position, players are categorized and put into a roster slot based on the position they play.
This brings me to a conversation I recently had with Owen after this seasons tryout process, where Owen ended in a great spot on a good team, but not quite on his first choice roster.
Owen: “Why would Coach X pick Player Y over me, I’m better than him”
Dad: “Well are you like a ton better”
Owen: “Well Y is good, I’m just better”
Dad: “Here’s what I think Owen, Y has been playing on Coach X’s team for like 3 seasons. His parent is team parent, and he knows the other players, and there’s trust and a two way commitment. He’s part of the system! Coach X would have to think you are like 100X better than Y to give you that spot…”
So, here you go. You are a startup. You say – “I am such a better Category X than established player(s) Y. Those buyers would be crazy not to pick me over them…”
But I say, “the buyer has a relationship with Y. Y is part of their “team” already. Y is embedded in their business or life. Are you really 100x better?”
Now the good news is you have another choice. Don’t be a better X than Y. Be a “NewCat”. Unlike the volleyball roster, we can buy other new things that don’t fit into a “position” we already have filled. This happens ALL THE TIME! That’s why Category creation is SUCH A COMPELLING STRATEGY for a start-up. In fact, I’d go as far as saying it’s really the best one- full stop – drop the proverbial mic!
As I write this, I am sitting watching Owen’s practice with his new team. In sports, the best generational talents are often said to “Redefine their position” or “change the way that the game is played”. Wilt changed the center position, and paved the way for Akeem, Shaq and others, as did Michael and Lebron as well as Pele and Messi. They still are in the same category, the same position, but actually are 100x better. In business, the winners don’t change the way the position is played, they create a new position and change the game, not the way it’s played. In sport, that would be unfair, but in business it is actually #CategoryMagic.
It’s a conversation as old as the hills in the B2B marketing world:
VP of Sales to CMO – “We need a painkiller, our product is a vitamin”
CMO to VP of Products – “Sales says we need a painkiller”
VP of Products to CEO – “But our customers can’t live without it”
CEO to VP of Sales – “We’ve gotta sell what we have, figure it out”
Well, let’s get a bit pedantic for a minute and look at the definition of painkiller and vitamin before we offer an alternative, “magic!”
Webster’s defines painkiller in a very straightforward way, “something (such as a drug) that relieves pain”.
Vitamin, on the other hand is a bit more complicated. Webster’s very long winded definition is “any of various organic substances that are essential in minute quantities to the nutrition of most animals and some plants, act especially as coenzymes and precursors of coenzymes in the regulation of metabolic processes but do not provide energy or serve as building units, and are present in natural foodstuffs or sometimes produced within the body”
So, vitamins are “essential”, while painkillers are relievers of pain. Interesting to note, neither, at least definitionally, are problem solvers. I’ve written before about why the problem statement is SO important to B2B sales. If the problem is a deficiency of an essential element used by the organism, they it seems to me, fix the problem, rather than mask the symptom. You don’t see a high demand for skin creams to treat the pain of scurvy sores, because consuming Vitamin C solves the problem.
{As an aside, noted sales trainer John Costigan says “great salespeople find a hangnail and convince the customer they need a tourniquet”. Notice he did not say they need aspirin!” And raising the stakes on the problem is a big part of success in sales, marketing and messaging, but I digress a bit…}
So, let’s just sell vitamins then? Well, two problems there, vitamins are “minute in quantity” and critical to survival, but they DON’T create advantage or let the organism thrive, outcompete and win. When our scurvy-ed out sailor sucks a few lemons it doesn’t make him an America’s Cup winner, it just keeps him alive.
Now painkillers and vitamins are gazillion dollar markets, no doubt. But that’s where the metaphor kinda peters out. B2B Technology providers need to solve problems. And they need to do it in new and unexpected ways in order to unseat alternative solutions, earn meaningful profit, and grow faster than their competitors. In short, they need to sell magic, solutions that seem like magical potions, ones that don’t just put customers out of some pain, masking a symptom, ones that don’t just let them survive. No, they need to SOLVE PROBLEMS in UNEXPECTED AND SEEMINGLY MAGICAL WAYS that create strategic, highly valuable and transformative outcomes from their clients. After all, that’s why we call breakthrough medicine, “Miracle cures”.
And when we arm our buyers with magical potions, we help them transform their personal and business worlds and become heroes. And how cool is that? Who wants to sell boring old painkillers and vitamins when you can sell magic!
A client of mine recently launched their new Category initiative. They are both a technical and customer innovator in a hot, but crowded market, like pretty much all B2B technology innovators are. Their CEO views their #CategoryMeme as one of of their “Secret weapons” to winning in their market. The reception from customers, analysts and investors has surprised them, but honestly, not so much me.
Defining a defensible, meaningful and narrative driven category, creates a #CategoryMeme, an idea that sticks, replicates and spreads in the marketplace of ideas and products. This client has just started on their journey, but already is seeing the power of the #CategoryMeme.
Ideas are more powerful than technology, and #CategoryMemes are ideas that are built to Penetrate the market and create lasting market leadership. Ideas are best communicated through story, and the KJR #ViewpointStory, modeled after Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, is the perfect story framework to carry your #CategoryMeme into the hearts and minds of buyers, investors and influencers.
In my blog series that starts here, I explore the Penetrate, Replicate, Spread Framework for #CategoryMeme success. But the (not so secret) power and beauty of the right #CategoryMeme is perfectly summed up by my client like this…
“It’s going great, people hear us say ‘_______’ {Their #CategoryMeme} and they say yes, tell me more, how can I get one…”
Spreading your #categoryMeme is the third step in our Penetrate, Replicate, Spread framework, and takes off right where Replicate ends, with Enablement, then goes to Embedding and Incentivizing #CategoryMeme spread. We discussed enablement of #CategoryMeme replication in this previous post, and the great news, is the same principles apply when discussing Spreading. Here’s what we said;
Enablement – Once you’ve simplified it, create very sharable, very replicable assets and distribute them out broadly into the marketplace. Create a #CategoryMeme hashtag for your #CategoryMeme. Create a set of backlinks to a more detailed description. Create JPEG, AudioClips, Clipart, all showing and communicating the #CategoryMeme. AND VERY IMPORTANTLY, don’t just create them and share them, but let them fly into the world. Don’t trademark the #CategoryMeme or the artifacts, let the world own them!!! Share with customers, prospects, analysts, and YES EVEN COMPETITORS!!!
So we’ve done most of the work on Enablement, let’s move to Embedding and Incentivizing #CategoryMeme spread. On the topic of Embedding, we turn to our old friend Brodie writing on Meme spreading:
Some of the ways Mind Viruses encourage spreading are (by):
*Programming you with (another) meme like “get the word out before it’s too late” , pushing your “crises” and “window of opportunity” buttons
*Programming you a meme to the effect “teaching this to our children will help them”
* Programming you to evangelize the virus. Some synonyms for evangelize are …passing the favor on and enrollment
….Evangelism is the intentional spreading of memes.
Brodie, Virus of the Mind, Pages 145-146
If we want to create the conditions to encourage the spread of our #CategoryMeme, we need to embed urgency, cross adoption benefit, and membership memes into our #CategoryMeme. “Do it before it’s too late”, “The more who do it, the better it gets for all of us”, “Join the amazing club”, “A call to arms” are all examples of the types of Evangelizing Memes you can embed within your #CategoryMeme to encourage those already “infected with it” to Evangelize and spread it.
Lastly, we may want to Incentivize and catalyze spread through creating both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for spreading the #CategoryMeme. Intrinsic incentives such as the well known (but not very Google discoverable) #culturalMeme in the Jewish Community that if you make 3 “shidduchim”, introductions that lead to marriages, you’ll go straight to olam habah (heaven) . A clear incentive for spreading the religious continuity meme of marriage and procreation. In a business context recognition within the community of practice can be a powerful intrinsic reward. This can be facilitated and encouraged by #CategoryMeme designers through referencing (willing) adopters, and by creating venues and opportunities for them to promote themselves in the context of #CategoryMeme adoption. Extrinsic rewards can include affiliate and referral fees, badges and club identifiers and other tangible assets. (NFTs anyone:)).
So to encourage the spread of our #CategoryMeme, Enable, Embed and Incentivize its spread through the tools of marketing; asset creation and sharing, media and publicity, psychology and incentives, and good old #cash.
In my upcoming final post of this series, I will summarize our Penetrate, Replicate, Spread #CategoryMeme success formula.
In order for a #CategoryMeme to spread, the third step of our Penetrate, Replicate, Spread framework, first, it must replicate itself, and do so as Brodie says, “faithfully”. What does this mean? Our prospects and other market participants must be able to easily describe our category, in other words, to parrot our definition. There are three key steps to creating the market environment for #CategoryMeme replication. These are:
Simplification – Make it super easy to explain
Enablement – Providing the “pre-packaged” artifacts for market adoption
Reward – Create rewards for replicating the #CategoryMeme
Let’s take a quick look at each of these.
KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid! – Can you write a 1 sentence definition of the category? Can you provide a simple and clear metaphor for it? Can you sketch it clearing on the back of a napkin? Can you explain it to someone who is not part of your market?
Southwest – A New #CategoryMeme: the First Regional Discount Airline!
Enablement – Once you’ve simplified it, create very sharable, very replicable assets and distribute them out broadly into the marketplace. Create a #CategoryMeme hashtag for your #CategoryMeme. Create a set of backlinks to a more detailed description. Create JPEG, AudioClips, Clipart, all showing and communicating the #CategoryMeme. AND VERY IMPORTANTLY, don’t just create them and share them, but let them fly into the world. Don’t trademark the #CategoryMeme or the artifacts, let the world own them!!! Share with customers, prospects, analysts, and YES EVEN COMPETITORS!!!
Reward – Provide feedback to those who replicate (and spread) the #CategoryMeme. Connect with them, make them part of a club, a community of #CategoryMeme lovers.
As Reward bleeds into more structured programmatic work, we then enter the third phase of #CategoryMeme success, Spread, which I will explore in the next blog of this series.
Before DancingCats, TidePods, BucketChallenges and other “memes” took over the internet, a branch of social science called Memetics was actually built around the idea of Memes. The term Meme was coined more than 40 years ago in the landmark book by Richard Dawkins “The Selfish Gene“. Dawkins defined a meme as “a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene”, and sees the meme as information that replicates and is passed on. Further developed by others including Dennett in “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds”, memetics, the study of cultural evolution via the passing of memes from host to host in a society has been bouncing around academic and pop culture circles for decades.
After reading Dennett, I started thinking about how the ideas of memetics applies to Product Category Design and Strategy for my clients. Some quick Google searching convinced me that this is unchartered territory and to a book called “Virus of the Mind – The New Science of the Meme” by Richard Brodie. In this often quirky and new agey book, Brodie offers some basic frameworks on how Memes, what he very pejoratively labels Mind Viruses, spread.
Judgement aside, Brodie’s work is quite interesting when you think of Category Design and Marketing strategies. Brodie says that Mind Viruses work in three phases – Penetration, Faithful Replication and Spreading. What a great roadmap this is to category success.
So, how do we design a Category Meme that can do all of these, in other words, how does the category enter, replicate and spread across the marketplace. That is the $64,000 dollar question, or in many B2B categories, more like the $6.4B dollar one.
I must admit, I am interested and very infected by this idea, but as Mind Viruses go, this is a pretty rich and exciting one to study! In the next series of posts, I will try to unravel the mysteries of Category Design and Success, and how Category Memetics can help us to succeed.
PS – How many Memes can you count in this short post? Let me know your count in the comments – hint, you definitely need at least 2 hands to count them!
