Play Bigger

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!