Hello! Time for your quick dose of marketing insights from Fresh Salmon, your favorite B2B marketing newsletter.

I've been reading a ton about Category Design lately. I will therefore cover several topics related to Category Design in today's newsletter.

Let's get started. . . .

1) The Problem With Accepting The Premise

Business owners, founders, writers, and creators accept the premise, and there is very little emphasis around if we are having the right conversation. 

Here is an example - 

I am going to digitalize the patient appointment scheduling industry. 

When you make that statement, you accept the current state of the patient appointment scheduling industry.

The best you can do is to improve the existing solutions marginally.

This is when you fall into the lame tactic of creating differentiation with some kind of messaging that claims to be better or cheaper or easier.

With such a scenario, you're boxing yourself in the premise, and that means you're putting yourself in the same category as others.

By placing yourself in the same category as others, you are now competing with everyone in that category, which is counterintuitive to standing out.

Therefore, simply accepting the premise isn't enough, and it doesn't work in your favor.

You must challenge the norms and reject the premise.

2) Building a POV

Category Pirates who are experts in Category Design say that to see if you accept or reject the premise, you have to check if you are forecasting or backcasting.

Forecasting: Thinking about the future while standing in the past.

Backcasting: Living as if a different future already exists in the present.

If you are forecasting, you are still playing an old game invented by someone else, and unconsciously, you are competing.

By backcasting, you assume you are living in the future, and you see the opportunities there. Inventing a brand new game gives you the opportunity to write its rules. In that case, you are creating.

Your thinking decides if you are creating a new category or playing yourself in the existing category.

That's why POV (Point of View) is so important.

Having glimpsed the future, telling people how the future will be different is the next step. Now it's time to tell your POV.

Remember, simply having a meaningless tagline doesn’t mean you have a POV. 

When you have a tagline and subsequent POV that can easily work for someone else, then you don't have one.

For example: Substack’s POV is “a place for independent writing”. 

This POV won’t work for traditional media such as the Washington Post, and that’s the point, which is why Substack is seen as different.

3) The Power of POV

Your POV is not just your differentiator, it’s your “word-of-mouth marketing” fuel for your growth engine. 

Essentially, it is like a script you give to each of your customers, which they pass on to their friends and colleagues.

Your customers repeat and scale your POV.

This is when enterprise software RFPs are written based on your POV. Therefore, you will have the best chance of winning. 

The good POVs “make the market come to you” vs “go-to-market” as quoted by the Category Pirates in their book: Snow Leopard. 

Bonus:

Here is a tool that detects if the content is generated using ChatGPT OpenAI -> https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/ 

It will show "Fake" if it detects AI generated content. 

Interesting Thing That I Read Last Week

I found it funny . . . .

Tweet That I Noticed Last Week

Meme of The Week

Ouch. To hell with buyer experience??

What Do You Think?

This concludes this edition of Fresh Salmon.

I would like to hear what you thought of today's newsletter.

Also, let’s connect on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Cheers,

Vivek

PS. I love you ❤️