Name: Play Bigger
Rating: 3.9 (59 reviews)
Author: Al Ramadan, David Peterson, Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney

What’s in it for me? Discover how to create a new market category by playing bigger.

Are you ready to shake up the market? Do you have a game-changing idea on the order of an iPad or Uber, something that will solve the problems consumers didn’t even know they had?

Then these blinks are your ticket to becoming a category king. You’ll learn how to play bigger by inventing your market category and simultaneously dominating it.

In these blinks, you’ll also learn

why you should seek market solutions first and not problems;
why practicing patience is a rule when it comes to new ideas; and
why storytelling is a requirement for any company toolbox.

Category kings find and develop solutions to problems that no one else has noticed.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, if you had asked people how personal transportation could be improved, they would have told you to make a faster horse.

Henry Ford, however, imagined an ambitious alternative – the Ford Model T: the first affordable, mass-produced automobile.

Such a game-changing innovation is called a new category.

New categories offer consumers a vision of a new way to live and solutions to problems that few others have even considered.

When you need a taxi, for instance, you often scramble to hail one from the street or search high and low for a taxi stand. Then Uber came along and said, “Why can’t the taxi come to you, no matter where you are or what time of day it is?”

A person who thinks like this, who comes up with game-changing solutions, is called a category king.

Companies can be category kings, too. A company, after all, is the entity that develops the services and products that become essential in our lives. Old ways soon become obsolete, and we wonder how we ever survived before the new category came along.

We often think this way, because it’s only when a category king offers the perfect solution that we realize we had a problem in the first place! To become a category king, you have to not only show people the solution but also show them the problem.

Uber is a perfect example of a category king. Its innovative taxi service was all the more appealing because it highlighted the many flaws of traditional taxi companies.

Before Uber, customers had to track down a cab themselves, guess how much the final ride would cost, and fumble with bills and coins. With Uber, customers can order a cab through a smartphone, get an automatic price estimate, pay by credit card and even track the progress of the cab online!

It can take a long time for people to change their minds. Category kings need to have great timing.

When the automobile was first invented, consumers didn’t take to it quickly. People thought cars were unsafe, and it was some time before this prejudice would wane.

This can be true for any new category. When a company comes up with a revolutionary idea, it often has to wait for public opinion to catch up.

Kernaussagen in Play Bigger

Über den Autor

Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson and Christopher Lochhead are the co-founders of Play Bigger Advisors, where they coach technology firms to help them dominate in their respective market categories. Learn more about their work at www.playbigger.com.

Kevin Maney is a best-selling author and award-winning columnist for Newsweek.