019 | Inside Play Bigger and Category Design with Kevin Maney and Mike Damphousse | Studio CMO - a podcast by Golden Spiral, Shaping Technology Marketing

The Episode in 60 Seconds

Change. Nothing is so constant as change.

Technology is often the force that brings about change.

When technology changes the way we accomplish simple or complex tasks, there’s a gap in understanding. People have a hard time getting from/to—from where they are to the new reality.

Marketing leaders create the translation layer for users by designing new categories.

On this edition of Studio CMO, we dive into:

• What is category design?
• What Zoom did to be different
• Category design, at its core, is not marketing
• Would you like to be a Pepper?
• Inside a "lightning strike"

Our Guests

Kevin Maney is a bestselling author and award-winning columnist. He is co-author of the book Play Bigger, and has been an A-list writer and thinker about technology for 25 years at multiple outlets including being a contributing editor at Conde Nast Portfolio, and as a columnist, editor and reporter at USA Today.

Kevin’s most recent book is UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance, which proposes a new category of healthcare. It is co-authored with Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst and Stephen Klasko, CEO of Jefferson Health. Kevin and Hemant also co-authored the 2018 book Unscaled: How AI and a New Generation of Upstarts Are Creating the Economy of the Future.

He also writes music for and plays in a New York band, Total Blam Blam. (Stay around for the end of the episode for a track from the band.)

Mike Damphousse brings a hard-nosed, pragmatic aspect to category design, baked in from two decades as a company founder, CEO, CMO and sales executive. He understands how companies work and how to take a category plan from concept to implementation.

Mike was most recently founder and CEO/CMO of Green Leads, which introduced the pipeline generation category. He was previously CMO of Asteria, a data integration software company which went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Show Notes

When technology comes into a world and it changes the way things are done, what happens is there's a gap that occurs and understanding, and that gap is really difficult for people to cross. That's where the world of category comes in. - John Farkas

 

Category design is identifying a problem and delivering a solution that addresses the problem in a new way. Sometimes, category design occurs when a solution solves a problem users didn't even know they had.

People think in terms of categories. That's the way we sort out a world full of lots of, lots of choices. - Kevin Maney

Category design has a way of creating proprietary eponyms. Think Kleenex, Clorox, Phillips Head Screwdriver, Band Aid, and Jacuzzi... and now Zoom.

Find out more about Eddie Yoon and Superconsumers.

In a world of "Coke and Pepsi," be Dr. Pepper.

Read the history of "Be a Pepper" on the official site of the Dr. Pepper Museum. 

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Website of Golden Spiral, Shaping Technology Marketing