New Playbook Details Category Creation Strategy from HubSpot, Salesforce, Gainsight and Other Iconic Brands
[San Francisco, CA – June 18, 2019] — Today, Gainsight®, the customer success company, announced that the company’s Chief Marketing Officer Anthony Kennada has written the official playbook for category creation, “CATEGORY CREATION: How to Build a Brand that Customers, Employees, and Investors Will Love” (Wiley). The detailed playbook is written for entrepreneurs, marketers, and executives from startups to large enterprises, who are interested in creating and scaling category-defining brands that lead to faster growth and higher valuations for the company on top. According to the Harvard Business Review, companies that were instrumental in creating their categories accounted for 53% of incremental revenue growth and 74% of incremental market capitalization growth than their peer set. CATEGORY CREATION will be released on October 15, 2019, and is available for pre-order now wherever books are sold.
“Category creation has become one of the hottest topics in business, and for good reason, as there’s no strategy quite like it that can result in both commanding market leadership for the company on top, and incredible fulfillment for the customers, employees and investors along for the journey,” said Anthony Kennada, Chief Marketing Officer at Gainsight. “My team and I have spoken to thousands of companies over the years on how to create a category — I’m thrilled to capture everything that we as an industry have learned on the subject in CATEGORY CREATION to empower the next generation of founders, marketers, and executives to learn from our stories.”
In CATEGORY CREATION, Kennada explains how he led Gainsight in creating the customer success category, and shares success stories from fellow category creators like HubSpot, Salesforce and several others. The strategy requires much more than just having the best product, but the ability to start and grow a conversation that doesn’t yet exist, positioning a newly discovered problem in addition to your company and product offerings. CATEGORY CREATION will explain the 7 key principles of creating and dominating a category, as well as strategies to prove the impact of category creation investments on growth, customer success, and teammate engagement.
The foreword was written by Brian Halligan, Co-founder, and CEO of HubSpot, and creators of the Inbound Marketing category. Today, Inbound Marketing has become a well established business practice for marketers across all industries, and a global movement that has united communities across borders in 100+ countries and forged lifelong partnerships.
Praise for CATEGORY CREATION
Geoffrey Moore, Author of Crossing the Chasm and Zone to Win said, “In the hierarchy of powers that determines the value of a company, category power is the highest, and if you are the company who creates and leads a new category, that is as good as it gets ever. Category Creation is a game plan for doing just that.”
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box said, “We’ve reached a new era of software where companies are moving from IT stacks to cloud ecosystems – presenting today’s entrepreneurs with a unique opportunity to create net new categories of products that reinvent complex processes of the past with simple solutions for the digital age. Gainsight is a great modern success story for this emerging business strategy — I’m excited to see Anthony share his playbook with the industry.”
Keith Krach, Chairman & CEO of Ariba and DocuSign said, “It always surprises me that category creation isn’t better understood and more enthusiastically embraced by business leaders. I’ve had the privilege of being a part of four great companies — GMF Robotics, Rasna, Ariba and DocuSign – and every time, category creation was a key to our success. Anthony has been a student of this innovative business approach, and in Category Creation, invites other leaders to activate their courage to challenge the status quo.”
Jason Lemkin, Founder of SaaStr said, “It has been a pleasure to partner with Gainsight since its earliest days in driving the creation of Customer Success as a true function in SaaS. Having been a category creator myself, it is a different journey, especially in the first years. The standard ‘disruptor’ playbook just doesn’t work as well. Anthony’s incredible tome does just that, for the first time in enterprise software. It gives you the playbook to creating, rather than reinventing, a category.”
About the Author: Anthony Kennada is the CMO of Gainsight, the Customer Success company, where he manages the company’s global marketing strategy, including demand generation and brand marketing. Anthony spent the last six years creating a new market category in Customer Success by focusing on community building, content marketing, and live events that both build the brand and fuel it’s incredible growth. He is credited with creating the ‘Pulse’ community of Customer Success leaders. Today, over 25,000 executives attend Pulse conferences and the 50+ chapters of PulseLocal communities across the globe.
About Gainsight: Gainsight’s innovative customer-centric technology is driving the future of customer success. The company’s Customer Cloud offers a powerful set of solutions focused on customer success, product experience, revenue optimization, customer experience, and customer data, that together enable businesses to put the customer at the center of everything they do. Companies that use Gainsight grow net retention by up to 33 percent. Learn how leading companies like Adobe, Box, GE Digital and Workday use Gainsight at www.gainsight.com.
