Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

The founders of a respected Silicon Valley advisory firm reveal a groundbreaking business strategy called category design.

Winning today isn’t about beating the competition at the old game. It’s about inventing a whole new game―defining a new market category, developing it, and achieving market domination over time. You can’t build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you’re going to lose.

In this farsighted, pioneering guide, the founders of Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger rely on data analysis and interviews to understand the inner workings of “category kings”―the legendary startups and companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Uber, and IKEA―that give us new ways of living, thinking or doing business, often solving problems we didn’t know we had.

In Play Bigger, the authors assemble their findings to introduce the new discipline of category design. By applying this framework, companies can unlock explosive business growth, create new demand where none existed, and condition customers’ brains so they change their expectations and buying habits. While this discipline defines the tech industry, it applies to every kind of industry and even to personal careers.

Crossing the Chasm revolutionized how we think about new products in an existing market. The Innovator’s Dilemma taught us about disrupting an aging market. Now, Play Bigger is transforming business once again, showing us how to create the market itself.

This playbook for entrepreneurs, founders, and executives reveals:

• A New Business Strategy: Learn the discipline of category design, a proven framework for building a legendary business that creates and dominates its own market.
• The Category King Playbook: Discover why companies that create new categories―the “category kings”―capture over 76% of their market’s value, and how you can become one.
• Different is Greater than Better: Understand the critical mistake most companies make: focusing on having the “best” product while losing to competitors who build a “different” and legendary category.
• A Guide to Entrepreneurship: Whether you’re a founder of a new startup or an executive in a Fortune 500 company, learn the strategies used by Silicon Valley’s most successful companies to create new demand and redefine industries.

Dave Peterson is a co-founding partner of Play Bigger Advisors. Dave has been an entrepreneur, chief marketing officer, master of execution, and fixer of crappy marketing. He grew up in Iowa, and later moved to Silicon Valley, landing at CRM software company Vantive. He worked as head of communications at Mercury Interactive, and as CMO at Aggregate Knowledge and Coverity. He co-founded and shut down GiveMeTalk! a podcasting pioneer. Dave (apparently) loves crashing his mountain bike, avoiding trees on his snowboard, traveling to non-predictable places with his friends, and learning new things from his daughter. He lives in San Francisco.

Christopher Lochhead is a co-founding partner of Play Bigger Advisors. Christopher is a CEO marketing coach and category designer, keynote speaker, mediocre blogger, ski and surf bum. He has been called a "Human Exclamation Point" by Fast Company and "slightly off-putting" by The Economist. Christopher served as CMO of Mercury Interactive, co-founded marketing consulting firm LOCHHEAD, was the founding CMO of Scient, and served as head of marketing at Vantive. He is living happily ever after in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Kevin Maney is a bestselling author, award-winning commentator and a founding partner of Category Design Advisors. He co-authored Play Bigger, which has influenced company strategy throughout the technology ecosystem. His past books include the national bestseller The Transformation Principles and the New York Times bestseller The Two-Second Advantage and The Maverick and His Machine. He has written for USA Today, Newsweek, Fortune, The Atlantic, and Wired, and often appears on radio and television. He lives in New York.