Are you ready to master the most powerful business skill on the planet?

Over the past 20 years, Category Creation and Category Design has gone from being a little-known "positioning" secret from advertising legends like David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Al Ries, Jack Trout, Gary Halbert, and more, to now becoming the single most in-demand skill among business leaders, Fortune 500 executives, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, marketers, and even the next generation of digital creators. 

Why?

Because the business world is starting to wake up and realize branding comes second to category design.

No meaningful category? 

No meaningful company.

Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole—otherwise known as the Category Pirates—are the leaders of Category Creation and Category Design thinking in the digital age. And in The Category Design Toolkit, they walk readers through 15 absolutely mind-altering frameworks for how to see business, life, and the way people organize information into "categories" in their minds. Are you a B2B enterprise software company? Do you sell plastic widgets on Amazon? Maybe you're a small business owner, a biotech entrepreneur, or a YouTuber. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do. In order to have a meaningful impact on the world, in order to become known for a niche you own, and in order to dominate your industry in a way that separates you from any and all competition, you must create your own category.

Which means you must learn the skill of category design.

In this book, you will learn:

✓ How to objectively measure whether you and your company are creating a new category versus competing in someone else's (existing) category.

✓ How to prosecute The Magic Triangle: product design, company/business model design, and category design.

✓ How to find your Superconsumers, and leverage Superconsumer data to discover new potential categories.

✓ How to engineer a category breakthrough (even if you think your industry is "too saturated" or "all the good ideas are taken").

✓ The importance of being a missionary versus a mercenary—and why mercenary entrepreneurs and executives unknowingly compete over 24% of the market.

✓ The 8 category differentiation levers, and all the ways you can create a defensible moat around your business.

✓ How you can apply category creation & category design principles even as a small "e" entrepreneur or local business owner.

✓ How category design can also be applied to your career (and why you should aim to become known for a niche you own, not "build a personal brand).

✓ What happens if you neglect your category—and how to rage category violence industry leaders who make this mistake.

✓ How to write a legendary S-1 and raise hundreds of millions (even billions) of dollars in your company's IPO by making a case for the future growth of your category (which you created & designed).

✓ Why "Blue Ocean" isn't what you are looking for. And if you want to truly create a category of your own, you should execute a No Ocean Strategy.

This book is everything you need to know in order to learn, practice, and master the skill of category design.

To read this “mini-book,” as well as our entire archive of writing on Category Design, subscribe to Category Pirates here:

categorypirates.substack.com

How do you build a career with meaning?

Why do some writers and creators become known for a term, a phrase, or even an entire category, while others (talented as they might be) fade away?

Because the most memorable writers and creators become known for a niche they own. And, more importantly, they invented new language to help them show the world how and why they are different.

In typical Pirate fashion, this “mini-book” is the furthest thing you’ll find to conventional personal branding advice or “the ultimate guide to marketing yourself well.” Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole (otherwise known as Category Pirates), reveal why it’s not enough to just be “better” than the competition. You have to be different—radically different—and then you have to invent new language that solidifies your new ground. 

And they did it by inventing a new word that means exactly what they are preaching (how meta is that?).

Languaging: The strategic use of language to change thinking.

Languaging, according to Category Pirates, is what separates legendary writers, creators, and thinkers who make a dent in the universe from everyone else. It’s word-of-mouth marketing at its finest.

Want to stand out?

You can’t just “be” different. You have to Name & Claim your “different,” so other people can talk about it.

In this “mini-book” you will learn:

• How legendary writers use languaging: the strategic use of language to change thinking.
• Why it’s so important to “niche down,” and why the greatest writers & creators become known for a niche they own.
• What makes word-of-mouth marketing work, and how you can use Languaging to put “the right words in the right mouths.”
• How companies like Pfizer, Netflix, and McKinsey & Company all used Languaging to change the way customers perceived the value of their products and services.
• How Peter Drucker became one of the most prolific business writers in the world by using Languaging.
• How Malcolm Gladwell used Languaging to write one of the best-selling nonfiction books of our generation, The Tipping Point.
• And how Languaging + Category Design = a legendary, differentiated career.

Short, sweet, and to the point, this is niche marketing at its finest, and a playbook for how you can become known for a niche you own.

#1 Amazon Bestseller

A mediocre Category Designer will beat a world-class marketer every day of the week.

The reason is because all marketing sits within a context. "He or she who frames the problem owns the solution." Without this context—without a category—your marketing becomes nothing but screaming, shouting, and pitching customers with deals, discounts, and other short-term tactics in the hopes of landing a sale. But are you building your business? More importantly, are any of these efforts going to compound over time and establish you as the category leader?

Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole—otherwise known as the Category Pirates—are the authorities of Category Creation and Category Design in the digital world. Pirate Christopher is a 3x CMO, Pirate Eddie has driven over $8 billion in annual sales generated for companies, and Pirate Cole is a serial writing entrepreneur, and together they have put together A Marketer's Guide To Category Design.

In this book, you will learn:

✓ There is a new category of "human" in today's world: Native Digitals (people under the age of 35 years old). And if you are a Native Analog, then all of your marketing efforts need to sit in this new context called, "For Native Digitals, the digital world is the real world."

✓ Why so many marketers, entrepreneurs, executives, and even investors fall for The Big Brand Lie (falsly believing it's the company's "brand" customers care about).

✓ The "Better" Trap: why comparison marketing never works, and causes comparison-focused companies to fight over only 24% of the market.

✓ How to successfully execute a Dam The Demand strategy, stopping customers in the "old" world and moving them over to the new & different future you are creating.

✓ How to launch a Lightning Strike Strategy—and why "Peanut Butter Marketing" (spread out evenly throughout the year) is a guaranteed path to irrelevancy.

✓ What most marketers don't understand about Black Friday, and why discount campaigns and coupons are a bad way to grow your business.

✓ And finally, the difference between content marketing that captures people's attention and makes a difference versus content that goes nowhere.

If you are a marketer, or an entrepreneur/executive who wants to approach marketing through a category lens, this is the book for you.

Not your average consumer.

To read this “mini-book,” as well as our entire archive of writing on Category Design, subscribe to Category Pirates here: 

categorypirates.substack.com

What separates content that gets read, shared, bookmarked, and favorited versus content that falls on deaf ears?

Why is it that some digital creators can build email lists in the hundreds of thousands, even millions of subscribers, while multibillion-dollar companies with all the resources in the world struggle to build and engage readers via their company newsletter?

In this mini-book, the Category Pirates—Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole—reveal the 7 strategies creators, writers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and companies can use to differentiate their content (and how Category Pirates became one of the Top 10 most-read paid business newsletters on all of Substack in less than a year). Differentiation is not about short-term growth hacks, social media marketing tactics, or viral tricks. True content differentiation is about providing readers with a different lens through which they see the world.

In this “mini-book” you will learn:

• The 7 ways creators and companies can differentiate their content.
  

• How, if you aren’t going to be an original content creator, you should be a high-value curator.
  

• The importance of not confusing “length” and word count with value.
  

• How to write with courage, and say what no one else is willing to say (yet).
  

• 3 actionable steps to providing readers with new, fresh, differentiated thinking.
  

• And how to craft a radically different Point Of View.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this “mini-book” is a goldmine of mental pivots and actionable insights that will help you cut through the noise of your industry and become a voice of thought leadership, at scale.

To read this “mini-book,” as well as our entire archive of writing on Category Design, subscribe to Category Pirates here: 

categorypirates.substack.com

Personal branding is a lie.

And being known for the sake of being known is not the goal.

Instead, today’s creators, entrepreneurs, digital writers, marketers, and even executives and investors should aim to become known for a niche they own—to create a category of expertise built on their reputation to deliver legendary results. Unfortunately, this is not the way most people think about differentiating themselves today. Instead, much of the business world is consumed in a game of “more content, more outrageous.” Personal branding is all about capturing attention for attention’s sake—and the idea is that once you have people’s attention, once you have hundreds of thousands of followers, then you can figure out what to do with all that attention (monetize it in some way). But this is misleading thinking, and has unknowingly educated an entire generation of entrepreneurs to use gimmicks to rack up views on social media opposed to building differentiated assets and publish valuable content that allows them to become known for a niche they own.

In this “mini-book” you will learn:

• How an article in the late 1990s called “A Brand Called You” set off an entire movement of individuals becoming infatuated with the idea of personal branding.
• A brief history of how social media turned everyday actions into “content,” and how personal branding gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk preached the importance of “documenting everything.”
• The “Me” Disease, and why the next generation (86% of young Americans) want to be influencers when they grow up.
• And the big personal branding lie: why people are not brands, and just like The Big Brand Lie, thinking people care about “you” is one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a creator.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this “mini-book” is a Rally Cry for creators to unhook their mindset from caring about building a “personal brand,” and instead focusing on investing in their personal category design.

To read this “mini-book,” as well as our entire archive of writing on Category Design, subscribe to Category Pirates here: 

categorypirates.substack.com

How do you see the future before anyone else?

You play The Breakthrough Game—with your co-founder(s), your team of executives, your investors, your employees, and even your customers.

Playing “The Breakthrough Game” is how you form a category thesis—which inevitably leads to an investment thesis. Before any professional investor or partner at a VC firm makes an investment, these are the sorts of questions they are asking (and rigorously stress-testing) before writing up their rationale for why the firm should make an investment. 

In this “mini-book” you will learn:

• How to play The Breakthrough Game to see the future before anyone else.
• How to pay attention to industry headwinds and tailwinds and invest in new and different futures that can fundamentally change the trajectory of your category and business.
• The 8 questions you can ask yourself to determine where your industry and category are headed next, and how you can best take advantage of the changing times.
• How Campbell’s Soup created one of the most legendary breakthroughs in business in the late 1800s by betting on a different future.
• And more.
  

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this “mini-book” is a guide for how you and your team can think about where the world is moving next (and then make business decisions accordingly).

To read this “mini-book,” as well as our entire archive of writing on Category Design, subscribe to Category Pirates here: 

categorypirates.substack.com

Most businesses fight for demand.

From early in life, we’re taught to compete in a pre-existing game of comparison designed by someone else (read this sentence 3x). 

And in doing so, we unconsciously submit to someone else’s rules.

In business, this seems smart. Buy Google Ads for the keywords that indicate someone is already shopping and yell, “Pick me! Pick me!” The unquestioned rationale is: demand exists, and if our business can tap into that existing demand, we will find customers—and customers lead to profits.

There’s just one problem.

Businesses that compete for demand fall into product comparison conversations—often in categories with existing leaders. 

These people are not Pirates.

In this “mini-book” you will learn:

• A proven method for introducing customers, consumers, and users to your new category of product, service, or idea.
• How to strategically use language to move people’s thinking FROM the way it is (or used to be) TO the new and different way you are inventing.
• A step-by-step guide for naming your product, service, or idea so customers immediately “get it.”
• How Peloton successfully “DAMed the Demand” and created a new category of spin classes “from home.”
• And more.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this “mini-book” is an in-depth look at one of the most powerful business and marketing strategies out there—and a crucial component to creating a new category in the world.

To read this “mini-book,” as well as our entire archive of writing on Category Design, subscribe to Category Pirates here: 

categorypirates.substack.com

The content marketing category is a $400 billion industry.

And it’s estimated that by 2024, the content marketing industry will grow by another $270 billion, bringing the grand total to nearly $700 billion. But how much of the content being created (especially by enterprise companies and B2C companies) is actually worth reading? The truth is, most of it isn't. Which means the content marketing industry has unknowingly turned itself into a Content Marketing Industrial Complex—where "more content" as a strategy continues to yield results with exponentially diminishing returns.

The Category Pirates—Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole—call this Content-Free Marketing: The Art Of Saying Nothing, Everywhere. And explain why marketers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Grant Cardone, Tai Lopez, and other "personal branding experts" who champion Content-Free Marketing strategies have misinformed an entire education of marketers, entrepreneurs, executives, and even investors.

In this “mini-book” you will learn:

• Why "free" content marketing is never really free (and how "more content" as a strategy actually can hurt your chances of winning over customers).
• Obvious Lie Marketing, and how "jab, jab, jab, right hook" social media marketing approaches have unknowingly trained marketers to believe "pretending" to care is a "best practice."
• The 3 Big Content Marketing Lies—and why your personal story and your company's story are not what matter to customers.
• Why so few entrepreneurs, executives, and marketers ever truly become industry thought leaders (and what holds them back from writing and creating content that truly moves the world).
• And more.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this “mini-book” is a rally cry for the marketing world to sober up and stop mindlessly puking out "more content"—and instead think hard about how to present new and different thinking.

To read this “mini-book,” as well as our entire archive of writing on Category Design, subscribe to Category Pirates here: 

categorypirates.substack.com

Listen to the way most CMOs talk about their budget, and what you’ll hear is this:

“I’m not sure that’s in my budget.”

As a result, most marketing budgets get treated like a service bureau where everyone in the company gets a say as to where money should be spent. The result? “Peanut butter marketing” that gets spread around equally, yielding little to no meaningful results for the company.

Want to know how legendary CMOs create annual marketing plans that make a huge difference in the marketplace?

In this “mini-book” you will learn:

• Why the CMO needs to build a legendary relationship with the CFO (and the marketing & finance departments need to work together).
• How to throttle your marketing budget at the end of every quarter.
• Why Reach & Frequency marketing strategies don’t work, and the reason companies should operate on a 2-3x per year Lightning Strike marketing model.
• How Hershey, Macy’s, Apple, Chegg, and Amazon have executed some of the greatest Lightning Strike marketing campaigns in history.
• And more.
  

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this “mini-book” explains why year-long marketing should not be your dominant focus, and explains the exponential benefits of mattering to your most loyal customers just a few times per year. 

To read this “mini-book,” as well as our entire archive of writing on Category Design, subscribe to Category Pirates here: 

categorypirates.substack.com

Business media “platforms” and social media platforms have a problem.

The way content gets created, distributed, and monetized today is being radically transformed—and most people haven’t noticed yet. And up until now, creators have not been paid (fairly) for their work. 

But all that is changing.

Today, there are dozens of tools creators—ranging from writers to educators, artists, musicians, and beyond—can use to turn themselves and the content they create into independent businesses. As a result, the way creators think about, prioritize, use, and remain loyal to media and social platforms is changing. 

And the legacy platforms are teetering. 

In this “mini-book” you will learn:

• How legacy media platforms have long taken advantage of digital creators, and how their neglect of the category has led to tremendous category violence.
• How Patreon, Cameo, Gumroad, Mighty Networks, Shopify, Substack, OnlyFans, and many more are changing the way creators make money—fostering direct relationships with customers and cutting out the middleman. 
• Why business media (like Inc Magazine, Forbes, Fortune, etc.) are in trouble, and how their predatory business model has them all in a race to the bottom.
• And how, as a creator, you can be at the forefront of this new Direct To Creator movement to achieve independence and financial freedom for yourself, doing what you love.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this “mini-book” is the ultimate guide for creators who want to understand how to make the most of the changing media landscape.