Play Bigger gave the business world a phrase it could not resist. Category King. Their research team tracked 35 companies and found the leader of a category takes about 76 percent of its market cap, leaving everyone else to split the rest. The number is real. The book is good.
Kings do not crown themselves. That part did not travel.
What traveled was the shortcut. Do not join a category, make one. And since making one starts with naming one, naming became the work, because naming is the part you can finish by Friday. Everything else in category design takes three years and a fight you might lose.
So the ritual set in. A team argues over words, picks one, ships a new homepage. The deck gets a slide that says we are not X, we are Y. The founder says it on a podcast. Sales gets new talk tracks and a laminated card.Then the company waits for the market to show up. It does not.
What you built instead
You changed a word. You kept the same competitors.
Call it the Paper Crown. You cut it out yourself, put it on …
You Are Buying Back Your Own Customers and Calling It Performance
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Good Strategy Does Not Fail. It Gets Killed Before It Can Work.
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