Creating your own category: the strategy of redefining relevance

For a long time, one of the most prominent strategy thinkers, Michael Porter, has been known for his seminal book Competitive strategy. The title, powerful and evocative as it is, can lead to a misunderstanding. Porter explains that a corporation should seek all ways to become unique. The best way to compete is avoiding competition, by making your value proposition not only compelling, but also distinctive.

Now, how can you become unique? Being the best at what you do is one way. Innovating through technology or methodology, especially in intellectual services or consultancy, is another. But there are other paths to uniqueness. One of them is creating a new category in the mind of your audience.

This is not a privilege reserved for large corporations. Individuals can do it too. Ferran Adrià created the category of creative haute cuisine. Christian Escribà transformed a family legacy into a category of its own, artistic pastry, where food becomes spectacle and storytelling.

Categories can be created in many ways. The most visible approach is to identify an unaddressed need and invent a way to meet it. Sony did this with the first Walkman, letting a generation listen to music on the go. Spotify reinvented access with legal streaming. These innovations changed how people access and enjoy a benefit.

But categories can also emerge from subtler dynamics. You can build one by intercepting a shared sentiment. Simon Sinek did this when he realised that many professionals wanted to reconcile leadership with values. By connecting purpose, inspiration, and storytelling, he created a unique space for himself where his message became existentially relevant.

In strategic terms, I can think of three main approaches to creating or owning a new category:

1. cultural strategy.

Douglas Holt proposed that brands can differentiate by intercepting cultural tensions, the shared anxieties, desires, or contradictions that shape a society’s imagination. Rather than competing on features or basic emotions, cultural strategy reframes meaning itself. Sinek’s Start with why taps a deep tension in leaders who are committed to career growth but struggle to maintain personal integrity. Cultural strategy recognises that unease and offers a narrative that resolves it, turning meaning into the source of differentiation.

2. blue ocean strategy.

Blue ocean is often used superficially as a buzzword for being different. It is, in fact, a specific technique for differentiation. The technique consists in changing the value curve, that is, what customers recognise as value and are prepared to pay for. Changing the value curve means doing four concrete things:

• eliminate: remove factors your field has always offered but that your audience does not truly value.
• reduce: lower investment in elements that are over-delivered relative to their perceived value.
• raise: strengthen aspects that matter and are under-delivered by the field.
• create: introduce new value elements your audience has not seen and will care about.

A personal brand example: Hans Rosling, physician, educator, and author of Factfulness, shifted the value curve of expert communication in global development:

• eliminate opinion-led punditry and moralising lectures that audiences had learned to ignore.
• reduce academic jargon and static, dense tables that made talks inaccessible.
• raise data transparency, longitudinal comparisons, and empirical credibility from fieldwork and public-health expertise.
• create live, animated data visualisation and an engaging delivery that made complex trends intuitive.

By executing the four actions, Rosling created a category of data-driven and captivating global-health storytelling and became its prototype.

3. disruptive innovation.

Clayton Christensen described disruption as a process where smaller entrants with fewer resources succeed by starting at the low end of an existing market or in a new market of non-consumers. They offer simpler, more convenient, and more affordable solutions that are good enough on mainstream performance and superior on the dimensions those overlooked users really value, such as accessibility and cost.

A personal brand example: an independent executive consultant who targets companies that normally do not hire big consultancies.

• She focuses on non-consumers, ambitious SMEs priced out of top-tier advisory.
• The offer is good enough for the real jobs to be done, for example short strategy sprints, standardised diagnostics, and implementation checklists.
• She competes on accessibility and affordability rather than breadth of deliverables or prestige signals, aligning her structure to what this audience values most.

Creating a category is a deliberate strategic act: a redefinition of relevance. It means deciding what matters most, and helping your audience see the world through that lens.