Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

The founders of a respected Silicon Valley advisory firm study legendary category-creating companies and reveal a groundbreaking discipline called category design.

Winning today isn’t about beating the competition at the old game. It’s about inventing a whole new game—defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time. You can’t build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you’re going to lose.

In this farsighted, pioneering guide, the founders of Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger rely on data analysis and interviews to understand the inner workings of “category kings”— companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Uber, and IKEA—that give us new ways of living, thinking or doing business, often solving problems we didn’t know we had.

In Play Bigger, the authors assemble their findings to introduce the new discipline of category design. By applying category design, companies can create new demand where none existed, conditioning customers’ brains so they change their expectations and buying habits. While this discipline defines the tech industry, it applies to every kind of industry and even to personal careers.

Crossing the Chasm revolutionized how we think about new products in an existing market. The Innovator’s Dilemma taught us about disrupting an aging market. Now, Play Bigger is transforming business once again, showing us how to create the market itself.

Dave Peterson is a co-founding partner of Play Bigger Advisors. Dave has been an entrepreneur, chief marketing officer, master of execution, and fixer of crappy marketing. He grew up in Iowa, and later moved to Silicon Valley, landing at CRM software company Vantive. He worked as head of communications at Mercury Interactive, and as CMO at Aggregate Knowledge and Coverity. He co-founded and shut down GiveMeTalk! a podcasting pioneer. Dave (apparently) loves crashing his mountain bike, avoiding trees on his snowboard, traveling to non-predictable places with his friends, and learning new things from his daughter. He lives in San Francisco.

Christopher Lochhead is a co-founding partner of Play Bigger Advisors. Christopher is a CEO marketing coach and category designer, keynote speaker, mediocre blogger, ski and surf bum. He has been called a "Human Exclamation Point" by Fast Company and "slightly off-putting" by The Economist. Christopher served as CMO of Mercury Interactive, co-founded marketing consulting firm LOCHHEAD, was the founding CMO of Scient, and served as head of marketing at Vantive. He is living happily ever after in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Kevin Maney is a bestselling author, award-winning commentator and a founding partner of Category Design Advisors. He co-authored Play Bigger, which has influenced company strategy throughout the technology ecosystem. His past books include the national bestseller The Transformation Principles and the New York Times bestseller The Two-Second Advantage and The Maverick and His Machine. He has written for USA Today, Newsweek, Fortune, The Atlantic, and Wired, and often appears on radio and television. He lives in New York.