Why 'Category Creation' Is Mostly Bad Advice

Category creation became a fashionable B2B marketing strategy after Drift, Gainsight, and HubSpot popularized it. The strategy is real and it does occasionally work. It is also wildly oversold. For 95 percent of B2B companies, category creation is the wrong strategy and pursuing it wastes years of marketing investment.

Category creation requires three things almost no company has: a genuinely new way of solving an old problem (not just a better version of an existing solution), enough capital to fund 5-10 years of category education, and a founder or CMO who is a category-defining storyteller. If any of the three is missing, the category creation effort fails and the company ends up positioned in a non-existent category that buyers do not search for.

What to do instead: position sharply within an existing category buyers already understand. The win is differentiation within a known category, not invention of a new one. Buyers search for 'CRM' not 'revenue intelligence platform.' They search for 'compliance management' not 'AI regulatory operating system.' Match the language buyers use. Differentiate within it. Win.

The exception: if you have a genuinely new technology that creates a new buying behavior (early generative AI tools were a real category creation opportunity), category creation can work. Even then, the work is brutal and the timeline is long. Be honest about which side of the line you are on. Most companies are not on the category creation side.