Category Creation: How to Build a Movement

Category creation is really hard. It is expensive, it takes time, and it is not for every B2B company out there.

The Challenge of Category Creation

Creating a new product category is one of the highest-risk, highest-reward strategies a B2B company can pursue. It requires educating an entire market, building new mental models, and competing not just against other products but against the status quo.

What It Takes to Build a Category

Jason moderates a panel of industry leaders who have been through the category creation journey firsthand. They share the strategies, investments, and hard-won lessons from building new categories in the B2B SaaS space.

Is Category Creation Right for You?

Not every company should attempt to create a category. The panel discusses how to evaluate whether category creation is the right strategy for your business, and what the alternatives look like for companies that are better served competing within existing categories.

How to use this resource in evaluation

Use Category Creation: How to Build a Movement | DEMAND Conference as a working prompt for your buying committee, not as a standalone takeaway. The useful question is how the idea turns into governed campaign execution: which accounts are included, which contacts are reachable, which channels carry the message, which budget controls apply, and how results are reviewed after launch.

Bring the resource into a demo or internal planning session and ask each owner to inspect a different layer. Demand generation should review the audience and offer logic. RevOps should inspect CRM, marketing automation, and reporting flow. Sales should confirm whether the campaign creates context they can act on. Finance should ask how spend, conversion quality, opportunity creation, and pipeline are connected before budget expands.

Before treating this as complete, compare the recommendation against one current campaign. Check the audience source, channel fit, exclusion logic, approval owner, expected conversion path, and the report your revenue team will use after launch. That keeps the resource tied to an inspectable operating workflow.

• Audience fit: define the exact account, contact, customer, or intent segment this idea should reach.
• Campaign controls: confirm approvals, exclusions, budget limits, creative variants, and launch readiness before spend starts.
• Measurement path: decide which leading indicators matter early and which pipeline outcomes matter before scaling.
• Next action: turn the concept into one reviewed campaign object, one owner, and one follow-up date.

The strongest walkthrough should make the resource concrete: a campaign plan, visible guardrails, a revenue-review owner, and a reporting path that a revenue team can inspect without relying on native ad-platform summaries alone.