Winning today isn’t about beating the competition at the old game. It’s about inventing a whole new game—defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time. You can’t build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you’re going to lose.

In this farsighted, pioneering guide, the founders of Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger rely on data analysis and interviews to understand the inner workings of “category kings”— companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Uber and IKEA that give us new ways of living, thinking or doing business, often solving problems we didn’t know we had.

In Play Bigger, the authors assemble their findings to introduce the new discipline of category design. By applying category design, companies can create new demand where none existed, conditioning customers’ brains so they change their expectations and buying habits. While this discipline defines the tech industry, it applies to every kind of industry and even to personal
careers.

Crossing The Chasm revolutionized how we think about new products in an existing market. The Innovator’s Dilemma taught us about disrupting an aging market. Now, Play Bigger is transforming business once again, showing us how to create the market itself.

About the Author

Christopher Lochhead, Al Ramadan, and Dave Peterson are the founders of Play Bigger. They are former entrepreneurs, senior executives and operating guys who now coach clients as they design categories that matter. All three live in Silicon Valley. Kevin Maney is a veteran technology journalist and the critically-acclaimed author of The Two-Second Advantage, Trade-Off, and The Maverick and his Machine.He lives in New York. Together, the four authors have known, worked with or competed against many of the tech industry’s greatest category designers over the past twenty-five years.