Today you'll see some amazing examples of category design.
Before sharing this with you, there's something we need to talk about.
The examples you're about to discover are big brands.Just to make things clear:
You don't need huge budgets.
You don't have to be a big brand.
All of these brands started small.These examples show you the potential of winning in category design.
So here they are ...
Frozen Food Category.
Clarence Birdseye had a tough audience to crack in the 1920s. People all over the world preferred to eat fresh food whenever possible, so the idea of buying frozen food was a hard sell at first.
However, once Clarence convinced people of the benefits of having frozen food when no crops could grow in winter, as well as the superior quality of food that is frozen quickly, the company sales skyrocketed.
In 2015, the parent company was sold for €2.6B (or USD $2.8B) and Clarence is now thought of as the founder of the modern frozen food industry.
Coupon App Category
For many years, homemakers would busy themselves with clipping discount coupons from newspapers, which would then dictate their shopping at the local stores.
With the rise of e-commerce, people grew tired of looking for coupons, so Ryan Hudson developed an app to bring the coupons to the consumers.
Having saved customers $750 million and counting, the Honey app works as a browser plugin, instantly scouring the web to find discount codes whenever you reach the checkout of an online store.
Streaming Media
Blockbuster, a brick-and-mortar video rental store, had been the go-to spot for renting movies for decades. But when Netflix began offering door-to-door mail-order delivery, the movie rental game changed.
Unfortunately, the former Blockbuster CEO didn’t see it coming, famously missing out on an opportunity to acquire Netflix, which was in trouble because of the dot-com crash, for $50M.
Before long, Netflix executed category design to perfect effect, crushing Blockbuster with its streaming-media platform that could offer people instant cinematic gratification without leaving their homes.
