We kickoff a new season on category creation by looking at a common B2B marketing problem: your analysis tells you that your product should be performing better than it is. What is going wrong?

Sean, Mary and Tom lead a deep discussion into the top three reasons this could be happening — viewed through the lens of the smoking cessation product Chantix. Pfizer marketers initially struggled to understand why this seemingly strong product was not living up to potential.

What Pfizer discovered led them to re-shape their strategy, and successfully create an entirely new category. If you are in a similar situation, you can apply their learnings and unlock the promise of your products. You may even gain enough confidence to create a new category of your own!

In this episode you will learn:

• How a flawed stakeholder analysis might explain your disappointing results
• The top 3 questions to ask yourself if your product is underperforming
• Why better understanding of your customer’s options could liberate your product’s full potential

Here’s some quotes from the team’s discussion:

“It’s tempting to build a plan or entire category around a specific method-of-action and forget the emotional needs of the customer.”

“We’ve seen many cases where entire categories have been re-positioned by one company.”

“If you have a discrepancy between your competitiveness score and your real-life results, you could be missing a powerful indirect competitor.”

We hope you learn some valuable strategies from the discussion!