What it argues
Category Creation is Anthony Kennada's account of how Gainsight, where he served as chief marketing officer, built the customer success management category from scratch — and the broader argument that this approach to marketing, creating a new market category rather than competing within an existing one, produces compounding advantages that conventional brand-building rarely matches. The book is part memoir of a specific company's marketing journey, part framework for how to attempt the same.
Kennada's central argument is that category creation is not primarily about product features or competitive positioning. It's about identifying a problem that exists but isn't yet widely named, naming it, and then becoming the definitional leader of the conversation that forms around that problem. Gainsight didn't just sell software for managing customer retention; it defined "customer success" as a business function, gave it a job title, and built a community of practitioners who needed that function to exist. The software sale followed the category creation, rather than the other way around.
What it gets right
- 1.
Category creation means identifying a problem that exists but isn't yet named, naming it, and becoming the definitional leader of the conversation around it. The company that names the category typically leads it.
- 2.
Community is the most durable moat in category creation. A category-leading company doesn't just have customers — it has a professional community whose identity is tied to the category itself.
- 3.
The category brand and the company brand are different assets. Building the category brand first creates a rising tide that lifts the company, while protecting against any single competitor claiming category leadership.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Anthony Kennada served as chief marketing officer at Gainsight from 2013 to 2019, a period during which the company grew from a small startup to the defining leader of the customer success software category. He later co-founded AudiencePlus, a media company focused on helping B2B companies build owned audiences. Kennada writes and speaks widely on category creation, brand strategy, and community-led growth. Category Creation is his first book. He studied communications and has spent most of his career at the intersection of marketing, product, and growth in enterprise software.
