Category creation

I was listening to an interview with Barbra Gago, founder, and CEO of Pando, ex-VP of Greenhouse and ex-CMO, and ex–Global Head of Marketing at Miro. The topic was category creation.

It’s interesting to know that Greenhouse wanted to shift to a different category “recruitment optimization” from “applicant tracking system (ATS)” but they failed at creating a new category. Their audience kept on referring to the Greenhouse tool as an ATS.

However, in the case of Miro, since it was a disruptive product and there was nothing similar to it, the B2B audience would call it by many names such as online whiteboard, mind-mapping, etc.

To encompass them with only one word, Miro came up with “visual collaboration” considering that it is obviously visual in nature (online whiteboards and mind mapping are too!) and that it is used in businesses to let team members collaborate on an idea and work together.

Should you create a new category for your product?

Barbra thinks that creating a new category can be expensive and done with content marketing and PR mostly. If you have a well-established product in a particular category already, it would make no sense to create a new one. Instead, focus on being better than your competition. However, if you have a disruptive product like Miro, you might want to create a new category. But listen to your audience always. Because you don’t create it—your audience does.

Just a quick tip on how to find out which category your product fits into. Go to any review site like Capterra or G2, and find out products similar to yours. The category they fall into is where your product will belong too. Category creation, in essence, is the blue ocean vs red ocean concept. It’s easier to swim in the blue ocean but finding one can be hard. It’s easy to find a red ocean but swimming in that will take lots of blood, sweat, and tears.

The choice is yours.