検索キーワード： 著者 "Nicolas Cole" すべてのカテゴリー

Weekly deep dives into the Art & Business of Digital Writing, Ghostwriting, & Self-Publishing

Category Pirates - Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole - walk listeners through arguably the most important aspect of going public: writing the S-1. If there was ever a way to measure public company readiness, the S-1 document would be it. Within the first few lines of a company’s S-1, you can immediately tell whether they are positioning themselves in the context of the past, or are educating investors on a different (and exponentially more valuable) future.

Category Pirates — Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole — see a meaningful percentage of marketers, entrepreneurs, and executives trapped in what they like to call the "Brand Cult". These are professionals who have been taught the best (i.e., the most well known) brand wins. And this is a lie. The biggest brands in the world didn’t become successful because of their brand. They became successful by creating and dominating a new and differentiated category with which their brand became synonymous. Because categories make brands. Not the other way around.

Oprah Winfrey is not a brand. Oprah is a Black woman who was born into poverty in Mississippi to a single teenage mother who used her challenging and troubling childhood to inspire her to create a new category of television talk show that evangelized a more intimate, emotional, and confessional form of media. She did something different.

Category Neglect doesn’t come from people being stupid or lacking sufficient data and resources to spot the headwinds and tailwinds of the future. It comes from a refusal to acknowledge which direction the wind is really blowing.

One of the most common questions entrepreneurs and small business owners ask is, “how do I create a category if I’m not a heavily funded startup, or some massively successful company? How can someone like me create a category of my own?” This reveals maybe the single greatest benefit of category design: anyone can do it, at any stage of their life.

In 1973, Martin Cooper invented the cell phone. How? He started with a problem (the Chicago police needed an alternative to bulky two-way radios). He synchronized the magic triangle (product, company, and category design). He executed a lightning strike (a publicized call to his top competitor). And he won the category.

Almost all thinking is reflexive (having an unconscious “reflex” in response) versus “reflective” (taking a moment to consciously reflect on how the past may have created a preexisting mental model keeping you from considering a new and different future).

Christmas is a lightning strike for Christianity (not unlike how Salesforce created Dreamforce, their yearly conference). It happens once per year, and introduces the masses to the POV of Christianity ("Jesus died for our sins") without requiring any real religious participation. If you want to go to Christmas Eve mass, churches are open. And if you just want to Amazon Prime a bunch of gifts for your nieces and nephews and get drunk on spiked eggnog, God bless you!

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this “mini-book” is a goldmine of mental pivots and actionable insights that will help you cut through the noise of your industry and become a voice of thought leadership at scale.

Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this “mini-book” shares unique insight into what it takes to become a thought leader and successfully build a unique and differentiated category.

A small start-up based in Chicago came up with a radically different idea to help small businesses generate buzz, awareness, and customer acquisition. These digital coupons were called Groupons. Ten years later, Groupon has become a thing of the past, with a market cap of less than $1 billion.

Business media “platforms” and social media platforms have a problem. The way content gets created, distributed, and monetized today is being radically transformed—and most people haven’t noticed yet. And up until now, creators have not been paid (fairly) for their work. Short, sweet, and jam-packed with incredibly valuable insights, this audiobook is the ultimate guide for creators who want to understand how to make the most of the changing media landscape.

Ninety percent of what we’ve been taught about entrepreneurship, business strategy, and marketing is wrong. Without a differentiated POV, you are just like everyone else. No matter how cool, clever, or expensive your branding is. Short, sweet, and to the point, this is an audiobook for how you can attract customers, clients, fans, and followers.

The Magic Triangle is the combination of product design, company design, and category design that produces legendary outcomes in the world of business. All three elements—company design, product design, and category design—work together and balance each other to exert great force on a company’s success and value. And the legendary, enduring companies get these three elements of company design, product design, and category design in such a state of synchronicity that they reinforce each other.

From early in life, we’re taught to compete in a preexisting game of comparison designed by someone else (listen to this sentence three times). And in doing so, we unconsciously submit to someone else’s rules. In business, this seems smart. Buy Google Ads for the keywords that indicate someone is already shopping and yell, “Pick me! Pick me!” The unquestioned rationale is: Demand exists, and if our business can tap into that existing demand, we will find customers—and customers lead to profits.

The same way startups work hard to one day achieve a legendary liquidity moment and go public, the same can be said about individuals who achieve a certain level of autonomy and financial freedom in their personal lives. And in the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, it’s clear this desire for freedom is more desirable than ever.

A mediocre category designer will beat a world-class marketer every day of the week. The reason is because all marketing sits within a context. "He or she who frames the problem owns the solution." Without this context—without a category—your marketing becomes nothing but screaming, shouting, and pitching customers with deals, discounts, and other short-term tactics in the hopes of landing a sale.

Over the past 20 years, category creation and category design has gone from being a little-known "positioning" secret from advertising legends like David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Al Ries, Jack Trout, Gary Halbert, and more, to now becoming the single most in-demand skill among business leaders, Fortune 500 executives, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, marketers, and even the next generation of digital creators.

This book is for a very small percentage of business people. You see, most people in business are not trying to use Category Design to create a new category that changes the future and generates exponential new value. Instead, many people in business are trying to “not get fired.” Many people want to go to work, make a contribution, and go home.