The Four-Channel Category Rollout
Customer language, PR testing, analyst/directory validation, and content — the mechanics of making a category real
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 95%
Once you've decided to create a category, Gago's rollout runs through four channels in order. It starts with mining customer conversations for the language, uses PR as a cheap resonance test, then does the unglamorous work of meeting analysts and directory sites to get the category formally classified, and finally funds content and thought leadership to educate buyers that a budget line should exist at all. Skipping the analyst/directory step means the category never becomes officially real.
Origin
Barbra Gago's tactical playbook from establishing 'visual collaboration' at Miro, including having to meet G2 Crowd directly to get the category classified.
Core principles
- 01All the best positioning comes from a million conversations with customers, not from a whiteboard session.
- 02PR is a test instrument before it is a megaphone — put the category out and watch what resonates.
- 03In B2B, analysts (Gartner, Forrester) and directories (G2, Software Advice) are the institutions that make categories official for buyers.
- 04Creating a category means creating a budget line, which means the content burden is buyer education, not product marketing.
How to run it
- 1
Mine customer language at volume
Have a very large number of conversations with buyers and users. Capture how they solve the problem, how your system helps, the unique differentiators, and — crucially — the exact words they use. Every candidate category name comes from this raw material.
Pro tip Listen especially for the scatter: when users describe you five different ways, the category is the bow you tie around all five.
- 2
Test the category through PR
Push the category and positioning out at a high level through press and public commentary specifically to see whether it makes sense and resonates. Treat non-adoption of the language as data.
Watch out If press and customers keep translating your new term back into the old category name, that is your signal to abandon — as Greenhouse did.
- 3
Get validated by analysts and directory sites
Build real relationships with Gartner, Forrester, G2, and equivalents. Meet them, explain the category, and walk them through how its feature set differentiates from adjacent categories so they can create and defend the classification.
Pro tip Come armed with a feature-level differentiation story — analysts need to know how to tell your category apart from the neighbouring one, not just why you like the name.
Watch out Miro was not even categorized under visual collaboration on G2 initially. Without this step the category has no institutional home and buyers cannot find or budget for it.
- 4
Fund thought leadership and content
Publish heavily on why this is the category, what its unique value propositions are, and which pain points it solves. The job is to educate buyers that a category exists they can now allocate budget to, and why they should.
Watch out This is the expensive, ongoing part. Content volume is what converts a validated classification into an actual budget line.
In the wild
Miro was not ranked or categorized under visual collaboration on G2 Crowd because the category did not exist there. Gago's team met with G2, explained the concept, and walked through the feature-level differentiation between visual collaboration and adjacent categories so G2 could define the boundary.
→ Visual collaboration became a recognized directory category, other companies began classifying themselves in it, and the category was validated by the arrival of competitors.
Alongside analyst work, Miro ran heavy content marketing and thought leadership defining what visual collaboration was, because no buyer had a budget line for it and users were scattered across whiteboarding, mind mapping, and diagramming vocabulary.
→ The content created momentum — other companies started thinking in the same frame and typed themselves into the category, producing a multi-company category.
Common mistakes
Skipping analyst and directory relationships
In B2B and enterprise, analysts and directory sites shape what categories exist in buyers' minds. A category that lives only in your own marketing is not a category — it is a tagline.
Naming the category before listening
Positioning invented internally rather than extracted from a high volume of customer conversations tends not to resonate, and the resulting PR test fails expensively.
Is it for you?
Best for
B2B/enterprise marketing leaders who have committed to category creation and need the tactical sequence to execute it
Not ideal for
Consumer or PLG products with no analyst ecosystem, and companies unwilling to fund sustained content and buyer education
From the transcript
“the main thing which we've talked a little bit about already is really understanding your customers and their pain points and how they talk about…”
“one thing that's really important in category creation as well is actually like PR you need to get this category and positioning out there at…”
“really those directory sites which the analysts like Gartner and Forester and all these guys at least in B2B and Enterprise they really shape for…”
“because when you're generating a new category you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for”
From the episode
Category creation and brand building
Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)