Category design is the ability to create or recreate a whole new market category around a problem and therefore a new solution. -Christopher Lochhead
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Most people are living in someone else’s thinking. How do you find your space and create your own category? Why is it important not to accept the paradigm of your market? How do you go about designing a category in real estate? On this episode, Christopher Lochhead talks about disruption, positioning yourself in your market and the magic questions of category design.
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Takeaways + Tactics
There’s top-line revenue and there’s profitable business, those two are not always the same.
Prime movers create new categories and those categories are predicated on exploding abundance.
If you want to be the dominant player who gets the revenue and the margins, differentiation matters, and the way you differentiate is on the type of clients.
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At the start of the show, we answered a question about knowing where a seller is moving to. Christopher Lochhead then joined in on the fun, and gave insights on category design and how it came about. He also shared on herd mentality and how it dictates how we behave. “Humans don’t want to be outliers because our primordial selves know if you're an outlier, you’re going to get eaten first.” We went on to talk about the importance of being rigorous on use case and persona. Towards the end of the show, we shared on the power of creating more abundance.
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We also shared insights on;
Why the real estate industry is set for disruption Why we are living in a winner-take-all world The compounding power of a category king Studio 54 marketing Why you need to study the Big Lebowski------------------------------
There’s revenue but not all clients are the same value. -Christopher Lochhead
Every service and product we all love exists because a legendary innovator built a product/service, a company and a category at the same time. -Christopher Lochhead
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The three magic questions around category design are, “what problem did I solve, if I solve the problem what category am I in, and how valuable is my company/business?” It’s important to use clarity in your category design to position yourself, and evangelize a point of view that not only attracts your true tribe, but also repels the wrong people. You have to be willing to be an outlier, be rigorous with personas and use case, and be driven to create more abundance. Ask yourself whether you’re creating new abundance or fighting over a dead carcass.
Guest Bio-
Christopher Lochhead is co-author of the groundbreaking, Harpercollins produced book: Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets. He is also the host of the Legends and Losers podcast. Go to lochhead.com for more information.
