You don't evangelize the product, you evangelize the category | Gerardo A. Dada

In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Gerardo A. Dada, former CMO of Catchpoint, to learn how the company created the internet performance monitoring category and got customers, press, and analysts to adopt its language.

Topics Discussed: Why category creation only matters when it actually grows the business How Gerardo found the category by studying what Catchpoint did better than anybody else: monitoring the internet itself The three factors that made internet performance monitoring stick: a real market problem, full CEO support, and a disciplined language architecture How Catchpoint validated the category with interviews with ten of its best customers before launching, and how SAP renamed internal teams using the category language Why Catchpoint told buyers their two options were Cisco or Catchpoint The newsjacking system behind Catchpoint's best traffic days of the month The three-phase analyst relations sequence, from accessible analysts up to Gartner and Forrester Giving journalists free survey data and direct access to the same outage alerts customers received Where category creation money gets wasted Gerardo's book OutPosition, and why strategy, competitive differentiation, and positioning must work as one system

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

The market decides whether your category exists: Gerardo said, "What matters is the market needs to say that category exists." Anchor the category in a real problem, not product uniqueness: "It was not the company making up a category just to try to differentiate, or making a category based on what we think makes our product unique. It was made on a real need in the market." Validate the language before you launch it: Catchpoint ran interviews with ten of its best customers and asked how they would react if the company explained itself in the new language. The feedback: "I think that describes exactly what the company does and what is unique." Some customers renamed their teams using the proposed language, with SAP calling teams application and internet performance monitoring, AIPM. Evangelize the category, not the product: Catchpoint told customers their two options for solving the problem were Cisco or Catchpoint. Build newsjacking as a system, not a reflex: Pre-approved talking points, an analysis team, and executive calendars were ready by six in the morning after a five a.m. wake-up call. Gerardo's filter: "We should only talk to the market when it has something unique and interesting about the news that is happening." Major outages became Catchpoint's best traffic day of the month, with spikes of five to ten times. Think about the headline first: Ballpark financial impact estimates gave journalists what they needed. "You need to be prepared with those zingers for the press so that they actually pay attention to what you're saying and increases your likelihood of being quoted if you say something that's short, bold, and interesting to the market. So think about the headline first." Sequence analysts by path of least resistance: Start with analysts who are paid to write articles that validate the category, then bring that evidence to mid-tier analysts, and only then to Gartner and Forrester, who by that point are seeing market evidence of a trend. Treat journalists as customers to serve: Catchpoint handed the press its full survey data to use freely and gave journalists the same outage alerts that IT teams at Amazon received, instead of watered-down quotes that survive three rounds of legal review. Concentrate resources behind fewer concepts: Overdoing category creation wastes money that could promote the brand or product.

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