Christopher Lochhead is a bestselling author, #1-rated podcaster, and one of the best marketing minds of our time. As one of the co-inventors of category design, Christopher offers valuable insights for startups wanting to stand out in an ever noisier world. In this episode, Mike Maples Jr talks to Christopher Lochhead to clarify what category design is and why it’s vital for founders determined to create something legendary that changes the future.
Christopher Lochhead:
Here's the aha. It's one skill to compete for share in an existing market category, it's a whole other skill to design, redesign, or create the market category itself.
Mike Maples:
That's the voice of Christopher Lochhead, podcaster, bestselling author, and the marketing genius known by many is the godfather of category design. What is category design, and how can it be applied to your startup on its path to greatness? This is Mike Maples, Jr., of Floodgate, and it's go time with Christopher Lochhead.
Mike Maples:
Whenever I get stuck on a marketing problem, the first person I always call is Christopher Lochhead. Even though he started from humble beginnings as a dyslexic paper boy who got thrown out of school at 18, he's the best mind in marketing I know today. His podcasts, newsletters and books on marketing and category design are must-reads for people who embrace the philosophy of using marketing to create movements that change the future. And as you might expect, he also has a colorful personality. He's been called a human exclamation point, the quasar, as well as off-putting to some. I personally consider him one of my favorite people in Silicon Valley and a great friend. Let's catch up with him. All right. Christopher Lochhead, welcome to the podcast.
Christopher Lochhead:
Mike Maples, stoked to be here with you, brother.
Mike Maples:
Yeah. Well, I'm glad to have you here as well. So Christopher, you are, well, you're the guru of many things marketing.
Christopher Lochhead:
I don't know about that.
Mike Maples:
But one of the things that you're renowned for is the notion of category design expressed in a book that you co-authored called Play Bigger. So before we jump into the depths of category design, just what is category design in the first place?
Christopher Lochhead:
So it's a management discipline centered around the ability to create and dominate markets. And here's the big aha. I would posit to you that virtually every marketing book, discussion, and course is fundamentally flawed. I'll take a step back. One of my most favorite expressions is thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking. And so, every marketing book, or almost every marketing book, course, discussion, et cetera, assumes a context or a lens that never gets discussed. And that context or lens is, what we're doing when we're marketing is we're fighting for share, market share, in an existing market.
Mike Maples:
Right.
Christopher Lochhead:
And branding is all about promoting our brand so that people looking for a certain type of service or product have affinity with our branded product.
Mike Maples:
And so that will gain market share.
Christopher Lochhead:
Correct.
Mike Maples:
Okay. And so what's wrong with that? It seems pretty logical. The market is a market. It's kind of like real estate and you want to own more than your share of the real estate. So, why wouldn't that be an awesome way to think about it?
Christopher Lochhead:
First of all, it's not what any of the legends did because when you study the legends, they did the opposite of that. And here's the aha. It's one skill to compete for share in an existing market category. It's a whole other skill to design, redesign or create the market category itself. And what I would posit to you is the most legendary entrepreneurs in history do not want their product, service or, frankly, even themselves to be compared to what came before. Marketing in its traditional definition, branding in its traditional definition, is by default a comparison game. Steve Jobs wanted everyone to be compared to him. Sara Blakely wanted everything that came after to be compared to her. They are a demarcation point. And there's a distinction between capturing demand, which is what most people mean when they talk about marketing, and creating the demand. And that's what the legends did. And that's what category design is about.
Mike Maples:
So let me see if this kind of resonates with some of our core lessons that we talk about here. So I like to say that a startup is not a company and that actually, when you try to impose company discipline on a startup, you do precisely the wrong things. It's kind of like what's up is down. And so in the classical definition of marketing, it's about taking an existing set of markets, segmenting them, targeting different users, and on some level, by definition, you're being better rather than different because you're trying to gain share at the expense of the other guy, right? If you're Coke and Pepsi, you're saying there's an existing cola market. And what I often find about startups, a failure mode can be to try to map the market as this as if it's an exercise of analysis, right?
Mike Maples:
Whereas like entrepreneurs who do startups, the type of marketing they should be doing is category design in the sense that they're starting movements. And there's an infinite demand for the unavailable, but there was no way to size the market for ride sharing, smartphones, tablets. Great founders tell us how to think about the future and the product defines the market. And as the movement accelerates, that's how you size the market.
Christopher Lochhead:
Exactly. And I think somebody smart said once that legendary entrepreneurs are visitors from the future.
Mike Maples:
Right. Right.
Christopher Lochhead:
And so category designers are the legendary entrepreneurs that teach the world how to move from the way it is today to their vision, to their, as we talk about in the book, their point of view, right? So you mentioned ride sharing. Well, in that space, there's an existing set of solutions for what you might call the broad personal transportation market category, right? Well along comes Lyft and others and they say, "Well, wait a minute, we have a whole new idea. We've reimagined the personal transportation problem in the context of what's made possible by technology, the smartphone in our pocket, and we are creating, and I'm going to use these words very much on purpose, a different future. And in order for us to be successful, you have to believe that we can teach the world how to think differently about a problem and introduce them to this different future. And when enough of the world gets it, everything changes."
Christopher Lochhead:
And so legendary category designers are creating the future market categories and changing the way you and I do things in a profound way, as opposed to what you mentioned, Pepsi, who might be the biggest fucking idiots in the history of marketing, have been doing for generations, which is, I'll give you a simple example. Pepsi's whole marketing is Pepsi tastes better than Coke. That's their whole marketing. It's been true for 40 years. We do a simple exercise with you. And I say, "Hey, Mike, we can talk and think about anything except for pink unicorns. No pink unicorns, no pink unicorns. We can talk about anything you want to talk about. We can talk about startups. No pink unicorns, no pink unicorns, no pink unicorns." What's in your mind?
Mike Maples:
Pink unicorns.
Christopher Lochhead:
Right. And so when the idiots at Pepsi have a comparison discussion, that's what they're doing. And that's the mistake that almost every tech entrepreneur makes. "Our [carbadingulator 00:08:34] is faster, better, cheaper, has more mega flips, is thinner, is fatter is whatever it is." And the whole time-
Mike Maples:
Than somebody else's.
Christopher Lochhead:
Yes.
Mike Maples:
Right.
Christopher Lochhead:
So everybody's having a pink unicorn discussion and the pink unicorn is the current category queen or king in the market category as it's currently designed.
Mike Maples:
Yeah. And it's quite remarkable to me that I can't ever remember an advertisement or a marketing message that came out of Salesforce that talked about they could sort records faster or they could store more entries in their CRM. I can't remember a single time. And I can't remember a time when Steve Jobs ever said that the chip in his phone or the chip in his tablet was faster than the chip in the other guy's phone or tablet.
Christopher Lochhead:
Well, and here's the biggest mistake in marketing. We have massively over-rotated on brand. We don't have to talk about brand for 20 fucking years. We've done enough.
Mike Maples:
Okay.
Christopher Lochhead:
And here's the aha. Brands are about companies and products.
Mike Maples:
Yep.
Christopher Lochhead:
Categories are about customers.
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead:
That's the first big aha.
Mike Maples:
So branding is when you talk about yourself.
Christopher Lochhead:
Correct? Yeah. And normally people are doing it to beat Pepsi.
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead:
Not Red Bull.
Mike Maples:
Right.
Christopher Lochhead:
Red Bull distinguishes themselves from Coke, designs a new category. Pepsi competes with Coke.
Mike Maples:
And so rather than thinking about branding and talking about yourself, you want to, in the tech world at least, you want to be having a conversation about the better future.
Christopher Lochhead:
Yes. The better future, as a Big Lebowski fan, if you want to frame it in. So opportunity's one motivator, the better future, and problem is the other motivator. You got to get this thing fixed, right? So the Big Lebowski, "This aggression will not stand, man." Right? So another one of my favorite category designer entrepreneurs, I live in Santa Cruz, California, and another one of my heroes is Jack O'Neill, the inventor of the surfing wetsuit, right. I live a few blocks from where he used to live. He's passed away now. And if you buy an O'Neill wetsuit, you get a tag on it with a picture of Jack and there's a quote that says something like, "I'm just a surfer who wanted to surf longer." Right? And so here's a guy who pre the wetsuit, you're wearing trunks and wool sweaters. And I don't know how much time you've spent in the Northern California Pacific ocean, but you got 45 minutes in that outfit at best.
Christopher Lochhead:
Right? And actually the wool sweater can actually make it colder. Right? And so this guy sits there and has his big Lebowski moment, "This aggression will not stand, man. I don't want to have to go to Hawaii to surf. I want to surf here." And so he gets busy in the garage, right? And then he evangelizes the fact that now you get to surf longer, right? He's not talking about the synthetic that he used or this or that. He's not talking about those things. He's talking about the thing that he wanted, which is to surf longer.
Mike Maples:
Yep. Yep.
Christopher Lochhead:
The i.e. evangelize the problem, evangelize the future or the opportunity and then people will get that you're the person who's the marketer and seller and creator of the solution.
Mike Maples:
One of the reasons that I was excited about having you on this show is that I bet that a lot of founders are saying, "Okay, this category design stuff sounds good, but isn't category kings and being the gorilla of the category, isn't that what happens after you win? Isn't that what you think about later?" And what I appreciate about what you're saying is that on some level, category design starts with a provocative point of view that emanates from a profound insight. Right? And in any great startup has to have a non-consensus insight. Otherwise it's incremental. Otherwise it's better, not different. Right? And so if you can't have a provocative point of view from day one of your startup, you should be asking a first order question of, do you have an idea that's worthy of a startup, right? I mean, do you have an idea that's going to have the breakthrough potential energy to ever become the mechanical energy of a future great company?
Christopher Lochhead:
Absolutely. And to your point, if you're starting a company, do you really want to do something incremental?
Mike Maples:
Well, not if you want to succeed.
Christopher Lochhead:
Right. And so it's the people who make the world exponentially different, who A, make the biggest difference and candidly make the most amount of money because they create the most amount of net new abundance and value, right? Lyft, in the beginning, isn't, and this is another word you and I have talked about, right? They're not disrupting taxis or limos or whatever. Right? It's a whole new thing. In the same way, Airbnb is a whole new thing. They don't start off-
Mike Maples:
They're transcending the industry.
Christopher Lochhead:
Yes. It's a new design. The problem is thought of in a completely new way and the solution is thought of in a new way. And therefore it's a new category and it stands as distinct. And what legendary category designers do is they force a choice, not a comparison.
Mike Maples:
Okay. I like that. So let's talk about that some more. So why is it that different forces a choice and better doesn't?
Christopher Lochhead:
Airbnb is a great example. Their tagline for a while, and I may be off a few words, but this was essentially their point of view, which is "Don't just go there, live there." They might not have said it quite that way, but-
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead:
And their whole POV centered around live like a local when you're there, as opposed to stay at a hotel. They are driving the world from the way it is now to the way they want it to be.
Mike Maples:
Yep.
Christopher Lochhead:
Now on its surface, you could look at it and go, "Why the hell would I want to rent somebody's couch as opposed to stay at Chateau de La Ding Dong in Paris. This sounds terrible." But when you wrap the idea in a provocative point of view, it's like, "No, no, no, no, you're not renting somebody's couch. You're living like a local," right? And the fact that you don't have room service is a benefit, not a liability.
Mike Maples:
You have a chance to belong to the place that you're visiting, a sense of belonging rather than I'm staying. If I stay at the Four Seasons in Paris, it's the same as if I stayed in London and Austin, Texas, anywhere else.
Christopher Lochhead:
And so to your point on the insights, they see things differently and they don't necessarily disrupt or attack an existing industry. They teach the world how to think about something in a completely new way. And as a result, they create a massive new market category that today with Lyft or with Airbnb or any company that does this, ultimately they do start encroaching on the old territory of the incumbents.
Mike Maples:
Right.
Christopher Lochhead:
But they do it because they've created a whole new paradigm and that's how they've competed as opposed to having a "We're better than them. Compare us to them." And if I say to you, "Well, we're better than Marriott. We're better than Marriott. We're better than Marriott," we're back at pink unicorns. And for entrepreneurs who think they've truly created a breakthrough product or service, you can't talk about an exponential breakthrough with incremental language. You need new language to communicate what this is. Henry Ford comes out and says horseless carriage, right? It's a provocative point of view. He's creating, he's designing a new category of transportation. Before horseless carriage, everybody was fine. And he comes out and begins to evangelize a new possibility, right? And he creates a whole new future. And by saying horseless carriage, he's purposely, he's not saying, "Oh, our thing is five X faster than a horse or requires less maintenance than a horse or doesn't shit in your face while it's driving you around." He doesn't do any of that. That's a comparison game, right? He says, "Horseless carriage. We're the future of transportation."
Mike Maples:
It's a new thing.
Christopher Lochhead:
It's a new thing. And you're either going to horse and buggy, or you're going to horseless carriage, but you're not comparing a horse and buggy to a horseless carriage because it's a whole new exponential step forward.
Mike Maples:
How does category design relate to just brain science? What's the scientific basis for this? Or are we just a couple of dudes just having a cool conversation?
Christopher Lochhead:
I have done a lot of reading about this and there is a lot of research about the way the brain works. And if you take a step back and look at the research, you begin to realize it makes all the sense in the world and what it is is you and I need to understand and relate to things in a hierarchical file structure way in our head. And I'll give you a simple example. We know what transportation is. You'd call that a mega category.
Mike Maples:
Yep.
Christopher Lochhead:
And then you say, "Okay, well, there's shipping lines." Well, that's a subcategory of a bigger category called transportation. Then you say, "Automobiles." I know what automobiles are. And you say, "Oh, well, then I understand transportation, automobiles. Then I understand muscle car. I understand muscle car as distinct from sports car as distinct from SUV as distinct from minivan." Now they're all in this mega category called transportation, but there is a file system in our brain, there is a hierarchy in our brain that they need to get slotted into. And here's why. If you come and visit me in Santa Cruz and we're going to go out to dinner. And I say to you, "Hey Mike, tonight, I want to go out. There's a new restaurant in Santa Cruz that everybody's just loving. And my wife and I absolutely love it. We want to take you there. It's called Alderwood. That's where we're going tonight." What's a logical question you might ask me?
Mike Maples:
What kind of restaurant is it?
Christopher Lochhead:
Yes. You just asked me what category is it?
Mike Maples:
And I might not even, if you lead with, "We're going to Alderwood," my first response might be, "Eh, I'm not so sure." I'm like, "Alderwood?" For all I know it's going to be some weird thing.
Christopher Lochhead:
Right. And knowing that you don't live in Santa Cruz, I'm probably not going to say that. What I'm probably going to say is there's this new steakhouse in town that opened up that's unbelievable. And they got oysters and burgers and amazing. And it's called Alderwood.
Mike Maples:
Right. Right.
Christopher Lochhead:
As opposed to there's this new Italian place or this new Chinese place or whatever. And so you and I, as human beings, we need to know what file to put this in, what bucket to store this in.
Mike Maples:
And so now imagine you're a founder listening to this and you are in this zero to one mode and you just raised a tiny amount of money. You got no customers, you got hardly any product. It's hard to recruit folks. You're not even sure you're right. What advice would you give founders in that state to do category design? Why does category design even matter to them?
Christopher Lochhead:
Well, the first thing I'd say to you is if you don't do category design, you're going to be in a comparison game with the old paradigm. If you don't do category design as a zero to one founder who's only raised a small amount of money, by definition, if you don't tell the world how to think about you, the world will slot you into an existing market category definition, and they will be comparing you like the idiots in the car ad to other people that they think, by definition, have a like product. Then you'll fall into the dumbass trap of I'm going to show you my carbadingulater. And once you see how much faster, smaller, bigger, cheaper," whatever your thing is by way of comparison, "you're going to win," and that's not what happens. And so even in the zero to one phase that from the minute you tell the first person you want to hire, the minute you tell the first angel investor you might want to raise money to, the minute you talk to the first potential prospect, you want to begin to have an evangelism.
Christopher Lochhead:
You're creating disciples. You're evangelizing your point of view. You're introducing them to the future that you see that they don't currently see. And what you're looking for is actually, and this sounds crazy, not so much for them to invest or buy or join the company. What were you really looking for is for a light bulb to go on in their head for them to go, "Ah! The future is streaming, of course." And then ta-da, Marc Randolph goes off and raises money from Reed and the whole thing and all of a sudden you get Netflix, right? But if you'd sat there and said, "This is how people are going to do things in 1997, 1998, 1999," didn't look like it was going to be the case.
Mike Maples:
Yeah. And I guess a corollary to that is, it's almost good if quite a few people don't like your idea, right? Because if you're, if everybody likes your idea, if everybody thinks your idea is plausible, then they've been conditioned to like that idea already, which means that you're marketing better, not different.
Christopher Lochhead:
Correct. And if at least seven out of 10 people don't disagree or tell you it's stupid or whatever, like if eight out of 10 people tell you that they love it. You don't have something exponential.
Mike Maples:
[crosstalk 00:21:40] enough.
Christopher Lochhead:
Correct.
Mike Maples:
It's because they've already been conditioned to like it, which means they've already been exposed to it.
Christopher Lochhead:
Right. So, Red Bull is a great example, right? People didn't think they had a problem that Red Bull needed to solve. Right? You had Gatorade and you had caffeine. So why would I need that? You had hydration and you had caffeinated drinks, but you didn't have a caffeinated athletic drink, right? New category, right? 5-hour Energy, another great example, right? They re-imagine the problem. The problem is how do I give myself a little pep up when I don't want to consume a Red Bull or a coffee or a Coke,?they put it in a whatever it is, how many ounces it is, and bam, they create a whole new category that they purposely designed. So it's not an energy drink, which is what Red Bull is. It's an energy shot. Well, it's over $2 billion of market category that they created and they have over 80% of it. That's why, to get back to your fundamental question, why do I, as an entrepreneur, want to begin category design at the beginning? Because you want to be 80% of a multi-billion dollar market that you created, that you design and that makes you almost impossible to catch.
Mike Maples:
And you think about it. There's no excuse not to have a point of view that's different.
Christopher Lochhead:
Yes.
Mike Maples:
In fact, if the company idea is valid in the first place, by definition, it has to have a provocative point of view because it has a contrarian insight.
Christopher Lochhead:
And by definition, the way this is going to work is 60 to 80% of the people for the first couple of years are going to look at you, cross-eyed, not get it, think you're stupid, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then once you get to some number, again, I don't know if it's a thousand, I don't know what it is, but the market tips and things go from non-consensus to consensus fast. You want to be the entrepreneur that is driving that thinking, a demarcation point in language creates a demarcation point in thinking, which creates a demarcation point in value, which creates a demarcation point in spending and usage.
Mike Maples:
But the other thing I find interesting, and you touched on it is if you're going to engage in category design, on some level, you're telling a story about the future. And to tell the story about the future, you have to draw a contrast between today's world and a potential future better world that's enabled by your point of view. And when you describe today's world, dissing on it isn't effective, right?
Christopher Lochhead:
Correct.
Mike Maples:
Because, and what I like to call it, finding the weakness in their strength. And so what I find is that if you want to attack somebody, the best thing to do is to find the strength that everybody acknowledges to be true, and then spin it around from the weakness in their strength to reposition it.
Christopher Lochhead:
Well, exactly, and legendary category designers do it over and over and over again. Well, I'll give you one that's one of my favorites over the last little bit. There's a chain here in the Bay area of small restaurants called Sushirrito. Now, if you think about restaurants, the vast majority of restaurants and make the same mistake that entrepreneurs make in any business, which is they compete on better, not different.
Mike Maples:
We're the best Italian restaurant in town. We're the best sushi bar in town.
Christopher Lochhead:
Right.
Mike Maples:
Yep.
Christopher Lochhead:
These guys take a different approach, right? Different on purpose. They are focused on a different problem. And the problem they're focused on is we love sushi, but sushi to go sucks. Have you ever tried to eat sushi while driving?
Mike Maples:
Yeah. Can't do it.
Christopher Lochhead:
Can't do it. There's soy sauce all over your pants and shit. And in my case, my wife was trying to feed me and rice is flying everywhere and whatever, right? So if you're a mobile person and you want to grab some sushi to go, the experience sucks. So they re-imagined the sushi. And they borrow from the Mexican world, the idea of a burrito, wrapping it up in something. And they call the company Sushirrito, the world's first sushi burrito. And so now they're not having a competitive conversation called "Our sushi is better, faster, cheaper, closer to your house, fresher," whatever, our waitstaff is whatever. They're not doing any of that, they're doing, "Hey, you want sushi on the go? We're the answer." Right? And they've made themselves different and replaceable.
Mike Maples:
Yep.
Christopher Lochhead:
And to your point on giving your competitors credit, "Hey, listen, if you want to go sit down and have a nice dinner with your spouse or your friends and your family and enjoy a wonderful sushi restaurant, fantastic, have at it. That's not us. You want to come on in here, get some yummy sushi and get the F out and go for a walk or a drive or go back to your office or whatever it is?"
Mike Maples:
We're your peeps.
Christopher Lochhead:
Exactly. Different, right? Give the other guys credit for their strength.
Mike Maples:
So I guess that then we're kind of coming at this statement, right, a startup founder in zero to one mode should answer not why am I the best, but why am I the only?
Christopher Lochhead:
Correct.
Mike Maples:
And don't be the best, be the only.
Christopher Lochhead:
Yes.
Mike Maples:
And then find the people, the early people who are in on the secret for which you're the only, and then over time you remain the only, but you're the only for an ever-increasing market. You become the standard bearer for an ever-increasing market. And it sounds like what we're also saying is that the idea of a market tipping. So people talk about first mover advantage, but that's also kind of-
Christopher Lochhead:
Drives me crazy.
Mike Maples:
Yeah. It's kind of like old language about markets, because again, it assumes that there's this static map of a market, that you're kind of like the sooners who jumped the claims to kind of be land thieves in Oklahoma. It's not like that. You want to be the company that makes the tip happen.
Christopher Lochhead:
Yes.
Mike Maples:
Right? And some people call that last mover advantage, but you want to be, it's really the first to make the market tip.
Christopher Lochhead:
Amen. Hallelujah. And how you know you're winning is when the world begins to parrot it back. When, in your case, prospective entrepreneurs who would take investment from you start using the term super angel or it appears in the media. We had this happen to us with my podcast, right? I've been evangelizing this idea of a quote unquote dialogue podcast. We don't edit our podcast. We press go and then we press stop and there it is. And three years ago in the business space, there were dialogue podcasts in other areas, but there were very few and there are certainly no popular ones in the business space. All the business ones are all these motivational and all these guys with the value bombs and-
Mike Maples:
Hustle porn.
Christopher Lochhead:
The hustle porn stars and all that stuff. Right? And I said, "Fuck all that. I want to have real conversations that center on business and have a lot of life in them as well and that are free form, natural conversations. And we call them dialogue podcasts." Well, we're three years in and almost to the day we just won an award from ReadWriteWeb. They named their 25 best podcasts for people. We got best dialogue podcast.
Mike Maples:
Nice.
Christopher Lochhead:
And so that's category design when the world starts to parrot back your terms and your point of view to you and they categorize you in exactly the way you want them to.
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead:
Well, if you want a business dialogue podcast, we're the real thing.
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead:
Because three years ago, no one was talking about it and now it's being talked about. Right?
Mike Maples:
Yep. And, time will tell if people buy into this Starting Greatness gig, but it is explicitly and intentionally narrow, right? It's-
Christopher Lochhead:
It's a niche down.
Mike Maples:
It's zero to one, super ambitious founders, only talk about great outcomes and not everybody wants to create a massive upside company.
Christopher Lochhead:
Right.
Mike Maples:
We're not for them. Right?
Christopher Lochhead:
You're just about the beginning, you're not about, "Tell me about the IPO or whatever."
Mike Maples:
Yeah. Tell me about the hero's journey after the fact or the water down version. It's sort of like, what was that raw period of time, that right kind of crazy that those super performers went through before they'd been successful? And it's like, we could be broader than that, but you lose something by trying to be broader.
Christopher Lochhead:
And so the funny thing about this conversation we're having is we are having a conversation about category design on a podcast that is designing a new category of business podcasts that is exclusively niche down on the start.
Mike Maples:
This is like Inception or something like that.
Christopher Lochhead:
Right. But then you end up having these sort of existential discussions about what the hell is going on, but that's exactly right. You're not a generic business podcast. Neither am I. And you've niched down on a category you saw missing, and this is the conversation you wanted to have and wanted to hear. And you went out and created it and you're having the successes as a result. It turns out that's what all legendary entrepreneurs do.
Mike Maples:
A lot of founders they've invented something and they think of themselves as an inventor. Or they're like, "Hey, I've invented this thing. And now I got these two characters saying that I need to be a category designer." And what book should I read about that? How can I get smart about category design, if it's a third of my job?
Christopher Lochhead:
The godfathers of this stuff, beyond a shadow of a doubt, are Al Ries and Jack Trout.
Mike Maples:
Okay.
Christopher Lochhead:
I mean, there's no question about that. So their breakthrough book was a book called The Positioning, and there's a bunch of others. You and I have both read them. 22 Immutable Laws kind of synthesizes everything, but Positioning is sort of where it really starts. And their fundamental argument is what you're doing in marketing is you're quote unquote battling for a position in the mind. And they argued that you wanted to create a distinctive position. They talk about some of this stuff. They stop at Positioning. And today positioning equals messaging, which is fundamentally a communications exercise.
Mike Maples:
Right. Word fair, not warfare.
Christopher Lochhead:
Yes. Category design is the difference between boxing and mixed martial arts in that it is warfare. You're changing and Ries and Trout and as much as I love them, I disagree with them about this. They say the worst thing you can possibly try to do in marketing has change people's minds. Category designers change the world by changing people's minds.
Mike Maples:
So there's Play Bigger. There's Ries and Trout. Are there other folks that you think offer good content or just places to go or books or magazines or whatnot?
Christopher Lochhead:
I love everything David Ogilvy.
Mike Maples:
Okay.
Christopher Lochhead:
Right. The father of modern advertising.
Mike Maples:
Okay.
Christopher Lochhead:
And he doesn't talk about this stuff so much, but there's a swagger and an attitude to the way he thinks about advertising and therefore marketing that I think is really important. Even though I think there's some things he and I probably don't agree about, I don't even care about that. I think Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm is one of the most important books ever written for business people and particularly for the tech business. And I think if you look at Crossing the Chasm through a category design lens, what he's really teaching you to do is take that eight to 10% of the market category that responds-
Mike Maples:
Yep.
Christopher Lochhead:
And fire them up. Right? So that they go quote, unquote mainstream. A more modern version of a similar line of thinking is my buddy Eddie Yoon, and he's got a book out called Superconsumers.
Mike Maples:
Okay.
Christopher Lochhead:
And the big aha in Superconsumers is most people, when they look to this, they look at "Well, who are our best? What's our best customers, the 10% of our customers that drive 90% of our profits and what insights can we glean and how can we make more money off of them? And how can we learn things from them so that we can expand the category or create a new category?", et cetera, et cetera. His big insight is it's not the eight to 10% of your best customers. It's the eight to 10% of the most enthusiastic consumers in the category. And if you get them and they buy into your new vision, the future you're trying to create with your point of view, then the whole category tips. And you know, a great example of this to me is Les Paul, the inventor of the electric guitar. Les Paul was not disrupting the acoustic guitar.
Mike Maples:
Yep.
Christopher Lochhead:
He was creating a new thing. And if you're a guitarist, at a minimum, you've got one of each now. So he made the pie bigger for everybody. And the way he did that was there was some small sub-sector of the acoustic market category that he thought might be enthusiastic about, and I'm going to use this word on purpose, different approach. That's what Eddie calls a super consumer, somebody who is on the bleeding edge. It's what Moore calls an early adopter, right? Very similar ideas. And that's how you move categories from the way it is to the way you want it to be is you take your provocative point of view. You find the super consumers that Eddie talks about and you help you deputize or disciplize, If that's a term, those super consumers and they move the market category.
Mike Maples:
So what else do you think? What do you think we've not covered that founders should know about category design and how to crush that discipline?
Christopher Lochhead:
Here's a radical one. Don't market the product or the company. Market the category.
Mike Maples:
Okay. And does that mean market the point of view? How would they do that? How do they convert?
Christopher Lochhead:
Well, Marc Benioff is in year 20 whatever of evangelizing the cloud. Cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud cloud. And does he talk about their products? Sometimes. But for the most part, he is carrying that flag. And so the legends are always making the category bigger, are always protecting and growing and evolving the category via a provocative point of view. And they let the product stuff take care of itself. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't do any marketing of your product or service, but a radical idea would be spend 80% of your time marketing and evangelizing the problem, the opportunity, the future that you see. "This aggression will not stand, man. It makes no sense that there's a horse in front of this thing shitting in our face." Right?
Christopher Lochhead:
Whatever, and make that the enemy, make the way it is today the enemy and never stop evangelizing the way it could be or should be because that's ultimately, you're trying to create the future of your design, right? And so you have to continuously evangelize it. And if you believe what I believe, which is categories are about customers and brands are about products or companies, 80% category, 10% brand. Nobody said I was ever good at math.
Mike Maples:
All right. Thanks for hanging with me, Christopher.
Christopher Lochhead:
I love you, Mike. And hey, let me just say to you, not only do I deeply appreciate our friendship, of course I do, I really appreciate what you and Anne and your partners have done for Silicon Valley and our entrepreneurial world. I believe in entrepreneurship. I think entrepreneurs introduce the world to new innovations in a way that really matter. And I think there's not enough people in our world doing things to make a difference for entrepreneurship. And so I just also want to say thank you.
Mike Maples:
Well, thanks for putting up with me.
Christopher Lochhead:
I love you.
Mike Maples:
Back at you.
Thanks for listening to the Starting Greatness podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode or you're new to the show, I hope you listen to our past interviews with legendary founders like Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, the Instagram founders, and Keith Rabois. I'd love to have you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode. And if you like the show, I'd be grateful if you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow me on Twitter at m2jr And subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive content and events at greatness.substack.com. Until we catch up again, I hope you'll never let go of your inner power to do great things in whatever matters to you. Thank you for listening.