My category creation stories

Claiming the market category your new business plays in is one of the most important and consequential positioning decisions a technology business must make.?Announce that you’re competing in a well-known category that’s already crowded and mature, you have to break through a lot of noise and really stand out. But announce that you’re a leader in a brand new category that you’ve created, and you have to spend a lot of time and money educating everyone about this category and convincing them it’s relevant, exciting, and real.?

It’s not just vendors naming categories, there are times when industry analysts feel the need to redefine a category because the vendor marketplace has become too complicated, fragmented, or commoditized.?For example, in 2020 Gartner retired its long running Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management (WCM), explaining that the capabilities within this technology space had reached maturity and they did not believe the different products on the market were sufficiently differentiated to warrant the research.? Instead, Gartner incorporated these capabilities into a broader category they called Digital Experience Platforms.?Gartner took the opportunity to reinvent a narrow category focused on web content, and expanded it to include a broader definition of content management.??

Having been both an industry analyst with Forrester, as well as a product marketing leader for companies like Informatica, Okta, and Lattice, I’ve experienced both sides of the category creation process.?I’ve shared some of these experiences below, and my learnings along the way.?

Forrester: Evolving a legacy category into something bigger

When I first joined Forrester in 2006 covering a variety of data management markets, I was in an interesting situation with what used to be known as the ETL, or Extract-Transform-Load market. The Forrester Wave report I inherited was known as the ETL Wave, and the vast majority of client inquiries I received on this topic asked about ETL vendors and technologies.?But a few vendors, IBM and Informatica in particular, were trying to convince me to expand my thinking and rename this category to Data Integration, as Gartner had recently done. The vendor’s arguments were extremely valid that ETL was just one of many integration techniques, but I was concerned that my “ETL clients” were unfamiliar with the data integration terminology and would have a tough time finding the information they needed.?For my next Wave, to the disappointment of these vendors, I chose a conservative compromise, which was to keep the name of the Wave as ETL, but to incorporate the term data integration throughout the research to help bridge the terminology gap and prepare the market for this eventual change.??

In hindsight I made the wrong call. I should have embraced the new data integration category.?As an analyst, I was supposed to help the market anticipate where the puck was going and I didn’t do that.?If it was just a single vendor trying to convince me to rebrand a whole category to their unique marketing phrase, I would ignore them. But I had multiple competing vendors as well as another analyst firm I respected all making the same argument.? And guess what? The market evolved into Data Integration without my help and all of my customers easily navigated that change. In this case, leaders in the old “ETL” market felt confident that they could remain leaders in an expanded market known as Data Integration, which also enabled them to innovate their solutions and compete in whole new ways that were beneficial to the market as a whole.????

Informatica, Round 1: Continuously redefining an existing category

Fast forward a few years to 2012 and now I’m a product marketing leader for Informatica, who for years proudly used the tagline “The Data Integration Company.”?But over the years through M&A and organic R&D, Informatica’s portfolio had evolved from primarily on-premises ETL and data integration technologies to also include data quality, master data management, cloud application integration, data streaming, and was moving quickly into data privacy, data governance, and other adjacent markets.?As an analyst covering Informatica, and now as an Informatica leader, I frequently advised that it was time to redefine our market category. I felt we were confusing the market and not getting enough credit for the innovations and expanding capabilities we had.?But instead of trying to once again expand their market category like they did years earlier from ETL to Data Integration, leadership chose to dig in our heels.?They felt it was too risky to say goodbye to Data Integration where we were known as a clear market leader.?So they instead chose to include all of these adjacent technologies in our now expansive multi-product portfolio to be considered subsets of the Data Integration category.?This time, analysts and customers were not convinced. And while the individual technologies in the portfolio were positively ranked by analysts, everyone was a bit confused as to our vision and strategy for bringing the portfolio together. It wasn’t until Informatica was taken private in a PE buyout in 2015 that we truly focused on defining a category that best represented what we were doing.

Informatica, Round 2: Creating a new category to modernize

When Informatica was taken private, the primary goal was to help the company transition its model from being a legacy on-prem, perpetual license vendor to a cloud-first, subscription business. That required a significant rebrand that didn’t only incorporate a new look and feel, but also required a positioning overhaul of every layer of our messaging architecture. (Check out my article, Messaging is everything everywhere all at once!)?I was lucky enough to have been asked to lead this category creation and messaging effort, and I spoke with more than 100 customers, analysts, partners, and employees to help create the most credible, relevant, and effective messaging to help bring Informatica into the modern world.?

At the time, we were already the leader (upper right) in all six magic quadrants we competed, so the goal wasn’t to convince analysts that we’re not in these categories. We felt recognized by the analyst community, but our priority was to convince our new investors and all customers that we had long term viability and would remain an innovative leader for years to come. So we stopped calling ourselves The Data Integration Company, and introduced our new category as Enterprise Cloud Data Management (ECDM).?Nothing rocket science about that (and definitely nothing exciting), but its purpose wasn’t to disrupt existing categories - it was to clearly explain the huge and unique market opportunity that Informatica had the chance to dominate. The word “Enterprise” spoke to Informatica’s huge existing installed base of Fortune 500 companies around the world. We added “Cloud” to promote the massive R&D investments being made to re-architect the entire portfolio into cloud native, multi tenant SaaS solutions, and we used “Data Management” as a highly recognized catch-all category that better encompassed our broad set of data solutions beyond just data integration.? Our messaging guidelines to all employees and content producers specifically stated that although ECDM was not an official market segment, all our solutions, products, and services were meant to ladder up and align with our Enterprise Cloud Data Management market opportunity. Does anyone else claim to be a leader in ECDM?? Nope.? Did we need them to?? Nope.??

Lattice: Embracing a new category to better align with portfolio and brand?

More recently, I had an opportunity to help define a new market category when I worked as the product marketing leader for Lattice. For those not familiar with Lattice, they offer a variety of products in the HR tech space.? Lattice initially built its great brand around one primary product, employee performance and goals management software.?But over the years, they expanded their portfolio to include many other capabilities including employee engagement, career development, and compensation, among others. The category Lattice used to represent their multi-product portfolio when I joined was called “People Management Platforms.”?But because that category name sounded so much like performance management, they felt that category reinforced their legacy perception of mostly being a performance management solution.???

A big part of Lattice’s thought leadership and content reflected on how employer-employee relations have evolved, and businesses that only cared about top-down management and not focus on employee engagement and feedback were doomed to fail.?We chose to evolve our category name to “People Success Platforms” as this evoked less of a top-down management perception.?The category name had also been used nominally by another smaller competitor, and a specialist HR analyst firm also used that category in its research, so we felt confident we could maintain our leadership in this category while advancing our messaging to be more in line with our broader portfolio and messaging.?

Creating a brand new category

I hope my experiences above help to provide some insights into why and when it’s important for a business to consider how it positions itself in the market. You’ll notice that none of my examples were with companies that decided to go all in and create a net new category where they were the first (and maybe only) leader to start.?It takes a massive investment of time, people, resources, and sometimes timing and luck, to be successful at net new category creation. For product marketers that have had that experience, I’m sure they're amazing and challenging rides - and I’d love to hear about them!