The Importance of Category Labels
/Review of F. Suarez and S. Grodal article in MIT Sloan Management review, “Mastering the ‘Name your Product Category’ Game" by David Aaker.
I've stated many times before that the only way to grow, with some exceptions, is to innovate and create “must haves” that define a new subcategory (or category) and then manage that subcategory so that it wins in the marketplace and so that your brand becomes an exemplar. When this happens, subcategory competition becomes the focus rather than brand competition, and this can be a foreign concept to most marketers.
