Category Creation Is a Trap for Most B2B Companies

Somewhere between a Series A pitch deck and a positioning workshop, most B2B founders are quietly sold the idea that they need to create a category. The argument sounds intoxicating. Categories produce category kings. Category kings capture disproportionate share. If you can name the space, you can own it.

In practice, this is the most expensive marketing decision a B2B company can make. The companies who genuinely created a category — Salesforce with SaaS, HubSpot with inbound, Drift with conversational marketing — are vanishingly rare, took years of compounded investment to do it, and were already operating with a credible distribution moat before the category narrative was attempted. Most B2B companies who try to follow that path are reading the result and skipping the prerequisites.

The result is a marketing program that spends two years teaching the market a new word, while the company quietly starves for the deals it could have won in the existing category by being slightly sharper than the competition.

The two real positioning choices

When a founder says “we don’t fit any existing category,” what they usually mean is one of two more useful things.

The first is that the company sits between two existing categories. The buyer is partly trying to solve one problem (say, sales productivity) and partly trying to solve another (say, revenue operations). The temptation is to invent a third name that fits both. The sharper move is to pick one category as the entry point — the one with budget, urgency, and a buyer who already understands the problem — and use the other as differentiation inside it.

The second is that the company is genuinely doing something the existing category doesn’t cover well — but not so different that the buyer needs an entirely new mental model to evaluate it. In this case, the move is sub-segment positioning: a sharper claim inside the existing category, aimed at a specific kind of buyer the incumbents have failed. “We are the [category] for [specific situation the incumbents don’t handle].” That is positioning the buyer can act on. Category creation is positioning the buyer has to be educated into.

In both cases, the right answer is rarely a new category. It is a sharper edge inside an existing one.

Category creation is the most expensive way to be ignored. Most B2B companies don’t need a new tribe — they need a sharper edge inside an existing one.

— Jennifer Neenan

Why the temptation is so strong

The category creation pitch is seductive because it sounds like ambition. It also sounds like differentiation. The team can rally around it. The investors can underwrite it. The brand designer can have fun with it. Everyone is doing something that feels strategic.

The problem is that almost everything about it is theatre. Buyers do not search for categories they have never heard of. Procurement teams do not have a budget line for “category none.” Analysts do not write reports about a market that has not been named by more than one vendor. Sales reps inherit the burden of explaining what the company even is before they can have a conversation about whether the product would help. The category creation effort externalizes a positioning problem onto every conversation downstream.

Recent positioning research from Wynter found that 94% of B2B SaaS companies admit they sound exactly like their competitors. The honest read of that number is not that those companies should each invent their own category. It is that 94% of them have not yet done the unglamorous work of finding the sharper sub-segment they could credibly own inside the category they’re already in.

That work is not as exciting as inventing a name. It is dramatically more commercial.

The framework most B2B companies should use instead

The strongest positioning framework I see used by B2B teams is still April Dunford’s “Obviously Awesome” model. It deliberately resists the category creation reflex. It asks the team to:

• Name the category the buyer already places you in.
• Identify the real alternatives the buyer is comparing you against (often “do nothing” or “spreadsheet plus a smart hire,” not another vendor).
• Name the differentiated attributes that matter to a specific buyer segment.
• Articulate the value that flows from those attributes to that specific buyer.

What that framework does, structurally, is force the positioning to be commercial first and creative second. It assumes the buyer has a category map in their head already, and your job is to win a specific position inside it — not to convince them the map is wrong.

The companies I’ve seen do this work well end up with a positioning brief that sounds disappointingly modest at first. “We are the [category] for [specific buyer type] who is trying to [specific outcome] and is currently underserved by [named alternatives] because [specific reason].” It does not sound like a category king’s manifesto. It sounds like a sales rep’s qualifying script. That is the point. The buyer recognizes themselves inside it, and the deal cycle gets faster.

What this changes about the marketing roadmap

Once a company commits to sub-segment positioning over category creation, three things change quickly.

Content gets sharper. Instead of writing essays that try to define a new space, the team writes pieces that argue the specific buyer’s situation, name the failures of the named alternatives, and prove the specific outcome. Buyers nod at it instead of needing to be taught.

Sales gets faster. Reps stop spending the first five minutes of every call explaining what the company is. The category context is already in the buyer’s head. The conversation moves directly to “does this specific company solve my specific situation better than the alternatives I’m already considering.”

The product roadmap gets clearer. When the segment is named, the question “should we build this feature” stops being a vibe debate. The team can ask: “does this feature deepen our position inside this segment, or does it dilute our claim by making us look like a horizontal player again.” Either answer is useful.

Positioning is choosing who you’re for. If you can’t name who you’re not for, you haven’t chosen — you’ve described.

— Jennifer Neenan

The honest version of the category conversation

There is a category-creation conversation worth having. It just isn’t usually the one founders want to have.

The right time to consider category creation is not at Series A. It is after the company has demonstrated five to seven years of credible compound growth inside an existing category, has won an outsized share of a named buyer segment, has the operator credibility to be quoted, and has the budget to spend two years on a market-shaping campaign that will not produce pipeline in the meantime.

Most B2B companies will not meet that bar. Most should not try.

The companies that win in the meantime are not the ones with the most ambitious category narrative. They are the ones who picked the sub-segment they could credibly own, did the positioning work to claim it, wrote the homepage that named the specific buyer’s situation, and let the category around them stay roughly the same shape it already was. Modest framing, immodest results.

If your team is currently working on a category creation deck, ask one question first: which existing category does the buyer already place us in, and which sub-segment of it have we not yet credibly claimed? If the answer to the second question is “we haven’t really tried,” that is almost always the work to do first.

The category will still be there in three years if it turns out you actually need to create one.