For a business, that rule says a lot more than it seems to. The problem isn't the single reposted post. Instagram has learned to recognize content people have already seen, and it has decided not to spend its shop window on it.

How does Instagram decide who sees a business's posts?

Every piece of content has two audiences. The first is followers, who find it in their feed because they chose to follow the profile. The second is people who don't know the business yet, to whom Instagram decides to show it in Reels, in Explore or among suggestions. The second audience is the one that grows a profile, and it's where the originality rules hit.

In January 2025, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, explained which signals weigh most in that choice: watch time, likes and shares, meaning how many people send the content to someone in a private message. He added a useful distinction: likes count a little more with people who already follow the profile, shares a little more with people who don't. In practice, reaching new faces takes content that someone wants to send to a friend or a colleague.

We've already compared these numbers when we wrote about reels or carousels. What matters here is something else: a video people have already seen somewhere else rarely gets passed on to anyone.

What content does Instagram penalize?

There are three cases documented by Instagram itself, plus one that depends on who's telling it.

Reposted content. Beyond the threshold of 10 posts in 30 days, the 2024 rule says that when two or more identical pieces of content exist, Instagram recommends only the original instead of the copy. It does this when the original is relatively recent and when the audio and visuals match with certainty. Reposts also get a label linking to the creator. Content that has been substantially transformed is not affected: a meme, a reaction, a video with a new voice commenting on it. Publishers with licensing agreements or explicit permission from the creators are also excluded.

Videos with another app's logo. On February 10, 2021, Instagram announced it would make videos recycled from other platforms less visible, for example in the Reels tab, recognizable by logos or watermarks such as the TikTok one. Instagram explained it had received feedback that these videos made watching reels less enjoyable. The same announcement also targeted videos that were blurry because of low resolution.

Your own logo, on the other hand, is fine. In October 2024, Mosseri made clear that a reel carrying the logo of the business that posts it does not lose reach. Instagram tries not to recommend videos with other apps' logos, not those with the brand of whoever made them.

The same video on every social network. Here the guides disagree. Kolsquare, in its May 2026 analysis, writes that reusing identical creative across several platforms risks losing reach. Metricool, in its January 2026 guide, advises the opposite: post on other social networks to increase views. These are readings by companies that work with social media data, not rules written by Instagram. What Instagram has put in writing concerns other apps' logos and low-quality videos.

Is Instagram's repost button a problem?

In 2025, Instagram added its own button for reposting reels and posts. Reposted content carries a label, credits the original creator and goes into a separate tab on the profile, apart from uploaded content.

It's a detail that explains the platform's logic well. Sharing someone else's work and saying so is allowed. Downloading someone else's video and uploading it as if it were your own is the behavior the 2024 rules remove from recommendations. For a business the difference is practical: the button can help boost a video by a client or a supplier, but it doesn't build the profile, because that content still belongs to someone else.

What do many businesses that lose reach actually do?

Lined up against Instagram's rules, there are four habits that risk costing reach.

• The video made for TikTok, downloaded from the app with the watermark and uploaded to Instagram as is.
• The same ad uploaded to every platform without changing anything, not even the format.
• The profile filled with other people's content when ideas run out: the viral industry video, the supplier's post, the famous quote.
• The old reel that did well, reposted unchanged a few months later in the hope that it works again.

None of these habits gets the profile shut down. They make it invisible to people who don't know it, which for a business looking for new customers amounts to the same thing.

Why isn't the algorithm the real problem for a business?

Our reading, as a Category Design agency, is that Instagram's rules inevitably reward what a business should be doing anyway. Reposted or recycled content shows that the business has nothing of its own to say. Whoever watches it connects nothing to the brand, because they've already seen that video somewhere else or could find it on a competitor's profile.

Category Design starts from the opposite question: what specific thing do you want people to remember you for, that only you can tell? A repair shop that shows how it fixes a part others replace, a manufacturer that explains why its factory works differently. Content like this is original by nature, because nobody else has that material, and it's the kind of video someone sends to a friend saying "look at these people."

Recycling only makes sense if it changes the job the content does: the same footage edited two different ways for two audiences, a long explanation that becomes a carousel, a video revisited a year later with updated numbers. The identical file uploaded again isn't recycling, it's a copy.

How can you tell if your profile has been affected?

Instagram tells you. In the "Account Status" section you can see whether the account can be recommended to people who don't follow it. If it can't, the calculation is repeated periodically, and the profile becomes eligible again when reposted content in the previous 30 days drops below 10. From there you can also appeal the decision.

It's worth checking before changing posting times, formats or frequency. Many businesses spend months wondering why their numbers are flat, when the answer is written in "Account Status."

That leaves the most uncomfortable case. If a business and one of its competitors post the same video, as long as the video is recent Instagram shows only one of them to people who don't know either: the one posted first. Whoever reposted it has worked to get the other one's video seen.

And yet, a year and a half later, that name shows up in articles explaining to companies why nobody sees their LinkedIn page anymore. One of them, by GaggleAMP and updated in July 2026, says 360Brew shifts visibility from pages to people's profiles. GaggleAMP sells programs that get employees to share content. That doesn't make it wrong, but it's the first filter to apply when you read about this topic.

Do LinkedIn company pages really reach fewer people?

Yes, and almost everyone agrees on this point. The most quoted figure comes from the Algorithm InSights 2025 report by Richard van der Blom and his company, Just Connecting, which analyzed more than 1.8 million posts: a company page post reaches on average 1.6% of its followers. A page with 2,000 followers, then, speaks to about 32 people every time it posts, before any shares.

The same report says personal profiles get 561% more visibility than pages. It comes with a caveat: it's an average across very different profiles and pages, and these aren't LinkedIn's numbers, since LinkedIn doesn't publish averages on this. Anyone who runs a page can check it for themselves, though, by comparing the people reached with the follower count in the analytics.

Then there are the numbers best left alone. The Italian page of La Growth Machine, a company that sells tools for reaching prospects on LinkedIn, says personal profiles generate 8 times more engagement than company pages, without saying where the figure comes from; further down, in the same text, a case study says 10 times. GaggleAMP says employee networks are “typically” 10 times larger than a page's followers. These are plausible orders of magnitude, but they come from people selling the answer. The direction is clear; the exact multipliers aren't.

Why does LinkedIn reward people over companies?

LinkedIn doesn't explain it in these terms, so what follows is our reading.

People go on LinkedIn to see what people they know, or would like to know, are doing and thinking. A post signed by a company looks like an ad even when it isn't one, and people scrolling past skip it. A post signed by a person with a name, a face and a role reads as an opinion, and people respond to opinions. If the system deciding what to show looks mainly at what makes people react, it ends up favoring those who write in the first person.

There's also a less noble reason. LinkedIn makes money when companies pay to be seen. It sells an ad format, Thought Leader Ads, that lets a page's ad account sponsor a post by an employee, an expert, a customer or a content creator. In practice the platform has acknowledged that people work better than pages, and built a way to make companies pay for people's voices.

So should you abandon the company page?

No. The page has a smaller audience but a job no personal profile can do: it's where someone goes to check who you are after reading a post by one of your people. That's where they look at how many you are, where you are, what you do and how long you've been doing it. It's also the only space left to the company when the person who was posting changes jobs.

At the end of January 2026, at Inspire Day in Milan, the message reported by ItaliaOggi was similar: the page should stop acting as a megaphone for company messages and become a space where real people speak, with team members' points of view and reflections on the industry. Also according to ItaliaOggi, LinkedIn had 25 million active members in Italy at the end of 2025.

A division of roles that works for many small B2B companies looks like this:

• The owner and two or three key people write about what they see at work: a problem customers keep running into, a common mistake in the industry, a choice they made and why.
• The page keeps the facts: finished projects, new hires, company figures, and it reshares the people's best posts.
• Sponsored posts, if there are any, run from the page but can boost the people's posts, with their permission.

Anyone deciding who should run all this may find the questions in our article on how to choose who runs your social media useful: they apply to LinkedIn too.

What should the people posting for the company say?

This is the problem the numbers don't show. A company that asks five people to “post more” gets five profiles talking about different things: one about trade shows, one about motivation, one about products, one about technology, one about the company soccer team. Visibility goes up, but none of the readers comes away with a clear idea of what the company does and why it's different from the others.

From the point of view of Category Design, which is Project Mantra's work, before deciding who speaks you have to decide what gets said. Customers put every company in a mental box, a category. If the box is the wrong one, or the same one as all the competitors, the more voices repeat it the more they reinforce it. If instead the company has chosen the category it wants to be remembered for, each person who posts can tell it in their own words and with their own examples, and the posts add up instead of scattering. How to arrive at that choice is explained in our guide to Category Design; when the category is new, you also need a name people can repeat.

In practice, a single shared sentence that everyone knows by heart is enough. It shouldn't be copied into every post: it's a yardstick for telling whether a post fits or not.

What are the risks of betting everything on people?

Two, and it's worth looking at them up front.

The first is that the profile belongs to the person. If the owner is the company's only voice on LinkedIn, the company depends on how much time and energy that person has. If an employee builds an audience, that audience follows them when they change jobs. That's why it's better to have several voices and to keep on the page what needs to stay with the company.

The second is forcing it. People who write reluctantly, or who publish texts drafted by the marketing department and signed with their name, are spotted right away. An employee who writes once a month about things they really know is worth more than ten shares of press releases. Nobody who doesn't want to write should be made to: they can comment, which still counts on LinkedIn.

The platform, after all, has already put in writing who's in charge. With Thought Leader Ads the company chooses the post, sets the budget and pays for the campaign, but the sponsorship only starts if the post's author approves the request.

Four thousand better mousetraps didn't move the market an inch. The reason holds for many industries, and it is where Category Design starts.

Why does the best product often fail to win?

Because nobody buys a product in the abstract. Before choosing, customers decide what they are buying: “a mousetrap,” “management software,” “a watch.” Then they compare the options inside that box, with the criteria the box brings with it. Whoever wrote those criteria, usually the first company people remembered, starts with an advantage that a technical improvement rarely makes up.

That is how a company can be right about everything and still lose. Its trap snaps faster, its machine uses less power, its service answers sooner. But if customers measure everyone by the leader's yardstick, those advantages become spec-sheet details, and in the end the decision comes down to price.

Category Design works on this step: instead of asking how to win the comparison, it asks what customers should be comparing in the first place. We explain it in full in the guide on what Category Design is. Here we look at two cases where the mechanism is easy to see.

What happens when you compete on who does the most?

In August 1993 Apple put the Newton MessagePad on sale for $699. It was an ambitious device: a small handheld computer that recognized handwriting. It sold 50,000 units in its first three months, but handwriting recognition in the early versions was unreliable and often forced users to rewrite and redraw.

In March 1996 Palm Computing, which had meanwhile been bought by U.S. Robotics, introduced the Pilot. It did far less than the Newton. To write on it you had to learn a simplified alphabet, Graffiti: a bet, as the Computer History Museum puts it, that people would be willing to change how they wrote in order to be understood better by the machine. According to the Computer History Museum it cost $299, fit in a shirt pocket and synced with a home or office computer at the press of a single button.

During development Jeff Hawkins of Palm carried a block of wood the size of the Pilot into meetings and took pretend notes on it with a chopstick as a stylus, counting the steps the most common tasks required. The museum sums up the result this way: the PalmPilot succeeded because it was an accessory to the computer, not a replacement for it. U.S. Robotics sold about a million in the first 18 months. Apple discontinued the Newton line in 1998.

Our reading is that Palm didn't beat the Newton in the Newton's race. The Newton asked to be judged as a computer, and as a computer it was small and imprecise. The Pilot asked to be judged as a pocket organizer connected to the computer, a box where it was nearly alone and where the Newton's flaws didn't count.

How do you change the basis of comparison?

In the 1970s and 1980s Swiss watchmakers went through what is known as the quartz crisis: battery-powered watches made in East Asia were cheap and put the most established European brands under pressure. In our view, on accuracy, the ground on which Switzerland had built its reputation, quartz had made it hard to stand out.

On March 1, 1983, the first Swatch collection launched in Zurich: twelve plastic models, priced between 39.90 and 49.90 Swiss francs. An integrated production technique cut the number of parts from about 100 to 51. The name, according to the brand's history, is a contraction of “second watch”: not the good one you keep for life, but one to match your clothes and change. By the end of 1984 about 3.5 million had been sold.

Swatch could have tried to make a quartz watch slightly more accurate or slightly cheaper than the Japanese ones, and fought on ground where it started at a disadvantage. Instead it moved the question from “which watch tells time best?” to “how many watches do you want to own?”. On that second question, the comparison with the old competitors almost stops making sense.

So product quality doesn't matter?

It matters, but it does a different job from the one it is usually asked to do. Quality is what keeps the promise standing: the Pilot really had to sync with one button, and Swatch had to work even though it was cheap. If the product betrays what the category promises, customers notice on the first purchase and no new name will hold up.

What quality doesn't do is choose the race. A company that improves its product without asking which box it is being judged in risks becoming mousetrap number 4,401: better, patented, and unknown.

How can you tell if your company is playing on the wrong field?

In our work with Italian companies, the signs that come up are almost always the same. You lose customers on price to competitors you consider worse. Customers describe you in the industry leader's terms: “you're like them, but…”. You do something nobody in your market talks about, a delivery time, a service, a way of working, and you give it away without ever mentioning it. We have collected five of them in a separate article on the signs of the wrong category.

For us at Project Mantra, the question to ask is easy to write and uncomfortable to answer: if tomorrow your customers judged you on criteria you chose, what would they be? If the answer is “the same as now, only a bit better,” the work to be done concerns the category more than the product.

The Newton cost $699 and did more. The Pilot cost $299 and did less. It was the Pilot that sold a million units, and the Newton that was pulled from the market.

The company was Dollar Shave Club, and that video is still one of the examples people cite most when they talk about company videos. It's usually remembered for its humor. It's worth watching for a different reason: it contains very few of the things a company usually puts in its own.

What does a company video need to include?

Less than you'd think, but in a precise order.

Who you are and who you're for, said right away. One sentence the viewer could repeat to a colleague. If after ten seconds a viewer still doesn't know what the company does, the rest of the video works against it.

The problem, seen by the person who has it. Not “we offer integrated logistics solutions,” but the truck that shows up late and the customer who calls three times. The problem told from the customer's side is the part of the video where viewers recognize themselves.

One piece of proof, shown. A product doing something on camera, a real customer describing a result, a number that can be checked. Viewers skip the claims they can't see (“we're reliable,” “we put passion into it”).

The people. The faces of the people who work at the company, ideally busy with what they really do and not lined up posing.

A single ask at the end. Visit the website, book a trial, call. One, not four.

Why do so many company videos look alike?

Because they all follow the same outline: an aerial shot of the headquarters, hands at work in slow motion, the founder telling how it all began, the values written on screen, the client logos, the company logo on a white background. Each of these scenes makes sense on its own. Lined up, they produce a video anyone in the industry could sign.

As we read it, the reason is that almost all these videos describe the category, not the company. They show what a company of that type does, and in doing so they put viewers in a position to compare it with others of the same type, almost always on price. It's the same mechanism we describe in our guide to Category Design: whoever presents themselves in their industry's words gets judged by their industry's criteria. If a video seems interchangeable with a competitor's, it's often one of the signs you're competing in the wrong category.

What goes in the first few seconds?

The most important things, because part of the audience won't see the rest. Wistia, a platform that hosts business videos and measures how they're watched, reports that videos under one minute are watched for an average of 52% of their length. Put another way: roughly one person in two sees what's in the second half of a short video.

Google reaches a similar conclusion for YouTube advertising. Its guidelines, called ABCD (grab attention, show the brand, build a connection, say what to do), recommend showing the product or logo within the first five seconds and bringing it back during the video, instead of saving it for the last shot. Kantar, hired by Google to validate them, analyzed more than 11,000 ads; Google concludes from this that ads following these guidelines have on average a 30% higher likelihood of short-term sales and a 17% higher long-term brand contribution. These are estimates produced by a model and commissioned by the company that sells the ad space, so they should be taken as a sense of direction, not a promise.

For a company video the practical consequence is simple: the founding story, if it's needed, comes later. The opening is for the reason the viewer should stay.

Does a company video need to work without sound?

Yes, and people almost always find out too late. In 2019 Verizon Media and Publicis Media surveyed 5,616 US adults aged 18 to 54: 69% said they watch video in public with the sound off. The same survey found that 80% of people who use captions have no hearing problems.

A video built entirely on someone's voice, with no subtitles and images that say nothing on their own, is for part of the audience a silent video of people moving their mouths. The test to run before delivering it is to watch it with the sound off and ask whether you can still tell what the company does.

What was in the Dollar Shave Club video?

A question and a calculation. The video asks the viewer: “Do you like spending $20 a month on brand-name razors?” And it answers itself: “Nineteen go to Roger Federer.” Nineteen of those twenty dollars go to the tennis player, at the time the face of Gillette's advertising. The company's offer started at $1 a month plus shipping.

That one line holds almost everything a company video needs. There's the problem seen by the customer: I pay too much and I don't know why. There's the enemy, without needing to name it. And above all there's a redefinition of what's being bought: not a better blade, but an end to the markup paid for other people's advertising, with the razor delivered to your door every month. Dollar Shave Club didn't try to beat Gillette on blades, where it would have lost. It moved the conversation onto ground where Gillette, given how it was built, couldn't follow.

What's missing is the aerial shot of the headquarters, the founding story, the values, the headcount. On July 19, 2016, Unilever bought the company for a sum the press reported at around $1 billion.

What can you cut from a company video?

Everything that fails this test: if we copied it into our closest competitor's video, would anyone notice? Generic footage of the plant, words like quality, passion and excellence, a parade of client logos with no result behind them, the company's history from its founding year: usually not, nobody would notice.

At Project Mantra we see this as the first job of a company video, before any shot: finding the sentence about you that a competitor couldn't say. If that sentence isn't there, no footage can replace it. If it is, the video often gets shorter on its own.

Before the shoot, the script Michael Dubin had written for the Dollar Shave Club video was four pages long. According to Entrepreneur's account, the director, Lucia Aniello, started her work by helping him cut it down.

Before we buy anything, each of us puts it in a box: “mineral water,” “accounting software,” “sofa,” “marketing agency.” Inside the box we compare the options, and when they all look alike we choose on price. That's why so many companies spend years explaining that they're a little better than the others: same box, same comparison, thinner and thinner margins.

Category Design moves the work one step earlier. Instead of asking how to beat the competition, it asks what problem the customer has that nobody is naming, what the solution to that problem is called, and how to make sure that, in the customer's mind, that new box holds only one name. When it works, the question the customer asks changes, from “who's cheapest?” to “who does this?”

A quick example. Listerine was created in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic and for decades it wasn't much of a success. In the 1920s it was promoted as a remedy for “halitosis,” a medical term few people knew at the time for bad breath. The liquid in the bottle was the same. What changed was the problem it answered, and with it the box the customer put it in.

Where does Category Design come from?

The name and the method spread with Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets, published by HarperBusiness in June 2016. It has four authors: Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson and Christopher Lochhead, Silicon Valley consultants, and the journalist Kevin Maney. The book studies companies such as Amazon, Uber and IKEA, and uses the term “category king” for the company that defines a category and then dominates it.

Two years earlier the same authors had published a study, Time to Market Cap, on American tech companies founded in 2000 or later and backed by venture capital. Its most quoted conclusion is that the king of a category usually takes 76% of the market value of the entire category. The number helps explain the logic of the method, but it should be read for what it is: research by the consultants who sell the method, based on a sample made up only of American tech companies.

The underlying idea is older than the book. In the spring of 1972 Al Ries and Jack Trout published three articles on “positioning” in Advertising Age, which led in 1981 to the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. Later, in The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, the second law is precisely the law of the category: if you can't be first in a category, set up a new one you can be first in. Play Bigger takes that law and turns it into work that involves the whole company, from the product to the organization to the way the salespeople talk.

How does Category Design work, step by step?

There's no single recipe, but well-run projects follow roughly this sequence.

1. Listen to the market's own words. You interview real customers, lost customers, salespeople and resellers, with one simple question: “How would you describe to a friend what this company does, and why would you choose it?” The answers show which box the market has already put you in, which is often not the one you think.
2. Write the problem before the product. The sentence you're looking for has this shape: “today the customer loses something because nobody does a certain thing.” If the problem doesn't convince the buyer, no name will save it.
3. Name the category. Two, three or four words that describe the solution, not the product. You test several names with real customers, because a name that wins the meeting and leaves the customer cold is useless.
4. Write the point of view. One or two pages: what the world looked like before, what no longer works, what the new world looks like and why the company is its reference point. The website, the videos, the sales decks and the trade show talks all come out of this text.
5. Change what needs changing. If the category promises something the product, price or service doesn't deliver, the customer notices with the first purchase. The hardest part of the work is often inside the company, not on social media.
6. Launch, then keep at it. You need a public moment when the company names the category first: an event, a trade show, a product release, a video. Then you need years of consistency, until the name of the category and the name of the company become the same thing in the buyer's mind.

Which companies have done Category Design?

None of the companies below talked about Category Design when they started: the name came later. But they are cases where the mechanism is easy to see and the facts can be checked.

Salesforce and the “end of software”

Salesforce was incorporated on March 8, 1999. On February 7, 2000, it introduced itself to the public in San Francisco with an event called “The End of Software,” in front of 1,500 people and with a concert by the B-52's. In March of the same year it paid actors to stage a fake protest outside the conference of Siebel Systems, the leading name in customer management software installed on company premises. The Wall Street Journal covered it.

People remember the protest, but the real move was the phrase. Salesforce never argued that its software was better than Siebel's: it argued that software you buy and install was over. If the customer accepts that frame, Siebel stops being a competitor to beat and becomes the past.

Listerine and the problem that had no name

Joseph Lawrence developed the formula in 1879 in St. Louis as a surgical antiseptic. In 1881 he licensed it to a pharmacist, Jordan Wheat Lambert, who founded the Lambert Pharmacal Company to sell it. The product didn't take off until the 1920s, when it was presented as the solution to “chronic halitosis.” In 7 years the company's revenue went from $115,000 to more than $8 million.

The advertising scholar James B. Twitchell summed it up this way: Listerine didn't create mouthwash, it created halitosis. In our view, this is the second step of the method above, done almost a hundred years before anyone gave it a name: write the problem before the product.

Moleskine, a notebook sold in bookstores

In 1986 the last workshop making the black notebooks that the writer Bruce Chatwin bought in Paris closed in Tours; Chatwin wrote about their disappearance in The Songlines, published in 1987. In 1997 a small Milan company, Modo & Modo, registered the Moleskine trademark and put the first 5,000 notebooks on sale. The decisive choice was where to sell them: mainly bookstores and design shops, rather than stationery stores.

In a stationery store, a hardcover notebook gets compared on price with every other notebook. In a bookstore, between novels and travel guides, it becomes the notebook of people who travel and write, and there usually isn't another notebook on the same shelf to compare it with. The object is almost the same. What changes is the category in which the customer meets it.

What's the difference between Category Design, branding and positioning?

The three terms are often used as synonyms, but they answer different questions.

The three don't exclude each other. A new category still needs a recognizable brand, and Ries and Trout already allowed for opening a category instead of fighting inside the leader's. The practical difference lies in the starting point: branding starts from the company, positioning from the competitors, Category Design from the customer's problem. It also lies in the scope of the work: a new logo gets approved in one meeting, while a new category often forces you to change product, price and the way you sell.

When does Category Design make sense for an Italian company?

Many Italian small and mid-sized businesses share the same profile: a very good product or service, often sold through agents and resellers, in a market where the customer compares price lists. In these cases Category Design becomes worth a look when certain signs appear:

• you lose customers on price to companies you consider worse than you;
• customers describe you in the words of your industry's leader (“you're like them, but...”);
• you do something nobody in your market names, a service, a delivery time, a way of working, and you give it away without talking about it;
• whoever runs the company is willing to change something beyond the communication.

At Project Mantra, to find out on the very first call, we start with two questions: “When you lose a customer, who do you lose them to, and why?” and “If you raised your prices 15% tomorrow, what would happen?” If the answer to the first is “to whoever is cheaper” and the second is met with a long silence, the company is working inside someone else's box.

There are also cases where the method is the wrong tool. If the problem is that nobody knows you because you don't communicate, you need content first. If what you do really is the same as what everyone else does, no new name will make it different. And if you need results within a quarter, it's worth knowing that even a success story like Listerine needed 7 years to really grow its revenue.

What are the most common Category Design mistakes?

Starting from the name. The category name is decided at the end. A brilliant name without a problem the customer recognizes is a slogan, and slogans get changed every year.

Building a category that exists only in the slide deck. If the website announces a new category and the customer gets the same product, at the same price and with the same service as before, the first purchase undoes everything.

Accepting a competitor's rules. When a company responds to a newcomer by copying its rules, it concedes the category. In early October 2003 Siebel Systems, whose founder had dismissed customer management software sold by subscription over the internet two years earlier, launched exactly that kind of service with IBM, at $70 per user per month. A Gartner analyst commented that the move validated a model that until then had been explained mostly by Salesforce. Seen through the lens of Category Design, Siebel was playing in the box its opponent had drawn.

Confusing the first to arrive with the owner of the category. Getting there first isn't enough. Small Parisian bookbinders were already making hardcover black notebooks between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, yet today that category carries the name of the company that revived them in 1997 and put them in bookstores.

Stopping at the launch. A category opens in a day and is won over years. Companies that go back to talking the old way after the event leave the category free for the first competitor that takes it seriously.

One last figure, useful the next time someone says having the best product is enough. Opened up, a Moleskine is a notebook: paper, a hard cover, an elastic band. In 2025 the company that makes it had revenue of €117.8 million.

The verb is the clearest sign of what Silicon Valley consultants call a category king. The rest of this guide explains what it means, why it matters so much, and what the companies that pull it off actually do.

What does category king mean?

A category king is the company that defines an area of the market, grows it and dominates it. The three actions go together: a company that dominates without having defined the category is an ordinary market leader, one that can be unseated by whoever changes the rules; a company that defines it without dominating it has done the work for someone else.

The simplest way to recognize a king is to listen to how customers talk. When someone describes a competitor by saying “it's like X, but...,” X is the king. It's the yardstick the market uses to measure everyone else, and it often ends up lending its name to the thing itself, as happened with “googling.”

A useful clarification: the category we're talking about is a box in the buyer's mind before it's a line in industry statistics. “Search engines” is a category, and so is “breathable shoes.” The king is whoever holds that box alone.

Where does the term category king come from?

The term spread with Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets, the book published in June 2016 by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney. In the book the authors use the name Category Design for the method a company uses to design the category in which it wants to be chosen.

The central idea of the book is that a company has to present itself as different, and not just as better. In the review published in IndustryWeek in June 2016, the example is Clarence Birdseye, who presented frozen food as something different from canned food, and not just better. Whoever says “better” agrees to be compared with the leader already in place. Whoever says “different” forces the customer to open a new box.

How much is it worth to be the king of a category?

Two years before the book, in 2014, the same four authors published a study called Time to Market Cap. They took venture-backed American tech companies founded in 2000 or later and measured their market value as of October 19, 2014.

The main figures are these:

• they identified 35 category kings, together worth $439.6 billion;
• all the other companies in the same categories were worth $137.5 billion;
• so the kings took about 76% of the total value, and never less than 70% in any of the categories or periods studied;
• of the 83 companies in that group that reached a value of at least $1 billion, almost half were category kings.

There's also a less quoted, more uncomfortable figure: according to the study, a company worth less than $500 million after six years has very little chance of becoming the king of its category. In other words, the crown is decided early.

It's worth being clear about what these numbers don't prove. The study was done by the consultants who sell the method, on a sample made up only of American tech companies, and it measures market value, not profits. The point still stands, though: in categories where one name becomes the reference, the second and third players split the crumbs.

Is the category king the first to arrive?

No, and search engines show it well. AltaVista launched on December 15, 1995. Google began as a university project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in January 1996 and became a company on September 4, 1998, almost three years after AltaVista. As of September 2026, according to StatCounter data, Google handles 89.94% of the world's searches; the runner-up, Bing, 5.29%.

Our reading is simple: AltaVista had the product first, Google took the question. When someone thinks “I need to look something up,” only one name comes to mind. On February 18, 2003, Overture Services announced an agreement to buy AltaVista for $140 million in cash and stock; that same year Overture went to Yahoo, and in June 2013 the AltaVista address started redirecting to Yahoo search.

Arriving first means having a product before the others. Becoming king means that when customers think of the problem, they think of you. The two sometimes coincide, but the second doesn't follow from the first.

Is the category king the one with the best product?

Not that either. The product matters, and no category holds up without a product that keeps its promise. But the market is full of better products that stayed unknown, because the people who made them agreed to compete in someone else's box. We've written about this in why the best product is no longer enough to win.

An Italian case helps show the difference. In 1989 Mario Moretti Polegato was in Reno, Nevada, on a business trip. During a walk his feet got too hot in his sneakers, and he poked holes in the soles with a hunting knife to let the hot air out. That gave him the idea for a sole that lets the foot breathe. The first thing he did was try to license his patent to established shoemakers: nobody was interested.

In 1995 he founded Geox in Montebelluna, in the province of Treviso, with a bank loan and five people. He started with children's shoes, which get replaced more often and so reduce the risk while the idea is still unproven; when the market responded, he moved on to men's and women's shoes. In 2023 the group had revenue of €720 million.

The interesting part, for anyone who studies categories, is the way Geox describes itself. Besides the Geox brand, the company registered a second trademark, Respira, which it uses for all its breathable technologies. The World Intellectual Property Organization points out that patents eventually expire, while trademarks, if used and renewed, stay with the company. Our reading: instead of talking about a patented membrane, which would have put it up against every other technical shoe, Geox talks about a discomfort everyone knows and places itself in the box that solves it. The patent protects the product; the name holds the category.

How do you recognize a category king?

There are some signs you can see from the outside, without reading a balance sheet:

• customers use its name for the thing itself. It's the strongest sign, and also the rarest: “google” has been in dictionaries since 2006;
• competitors describe themselves in relation to it. If the other companies have to explain how they differ from the king, they're working inside its category;
• it sets the reference price. The others position themselves above or below, but they start from its price list;
• when the category grows, it's mostly the king that grows. People entering the market for the first time choose the name they already know;
• journalists and customers ask it what will happen next. Whoever defines the category gets consulted when the category changes.

If your company shows none of these signs, it doesn't mean it's doing badly. It probably means it's growing in someone else's category, and that every new customer also strengthens the king that's already there.

How do you become a category king?

There's no guaranteed recipe, and be wary of anyone who promises one. The kings you can study, though, did more or less the same things, in the same order.

1. Choose a category you can actually dominate

The first mistake is aiming too wide. “Footwear” is a category where no new company can become king; “the shoe that breathes” is one where it can. A small, precise category in which you're the reference point is worth more than a huge one where you're the tenth name. When the small category grows, the king grows with it.

2. Name the problem before the solution

Customers don't buy a category: they buy the solution to a discomfort they feel. Before talking about the product, you have to describe that discomfort better than customers could on their own. If the problem you describe doesn't sound familiar to the buyer, the category stays an idea in a slide deck.

3. Name the category and use the name every time

The category name is different from the brand name, and it's the one that has to circulate: on the website, in catalogs, in the salespeople's words, in interviews. How to choose it is covered in a separate guide, how to choose the name of a new category.

4. Own the launch moment

This is the public, concentrated moment when the company announces the category, the problem and its own answer, all together. It can be an event, a trade show, a product release. One moment isn't enough, though: categories are built through a series of connected moments that repeat the same idea for years.

5. Build around the category

A king isn't alone. It has resellers who can explain the category, partners who build compatible products, customers who tell other customers about it. The more people benefit from the category existing, the harder it becomes for a competitor to call it into question.

6. Grow the category, not just your share

The king has an advantage the others don't: when the category grows, most new customers go to it. That's why it pays to spend energy bringing people into the category rather than stealing customers from competitors. It's slow work, and it's the reason the Time to Market Cap study measures time in years.

Can an Italian company become the king of a category?

Yes, and it often has a better chance than you might think, because many Italian small and mid-sized businesses already have what it takes: a way of working or a skill nobody else in their market has, which they give away without giving it a name. The problem usually lies in the habit of presenting themselves in the industry's own words: “we make quality components,” “serving our customers for thirty years.” Those are phrases that put the company in the same box as everyone else.

At Project Mantra the work almost always starts here: understanding which box customers have already put the company in, and whether there's a smaller, more precise one where it could be the only name. You don't need to be big. Geox started with five people and children's shoes.

Can you lose the crown?

Yes. A king loses its category mainly in two ways. The first is when someone opens a new category that makes its own obsolete: customers don't switch to a better competitor, they stop thinking in those terms altogether. The second is when the king stops defending the category and starts defending its product, chasing competitors on their rules. If you want to know whether you're operating in the wrong box, we've collected the five signs your brand is competing in the wrong category.

Arriving first, then, guarantees nothing. AltaVista had been online for almost three years when Google became a company. In 2003 it changed hands for $140 million, and since June 2013 anyone who types its address ends up on another search engine.

In other words, a carousel has two covers. A reel has only one, and if it doesn't stop the thumb in the first second, the moment is gone. That alone shows that the question “reels or carousels?” is asking us to compare two things that do different jobs.

What do the numbers say about reels and carousels?

The two most cited studies on the subject reach conclusions that don't line up.

Buffer, which makes a tool for publishing on social media, analyzed more than 4 million posts published between January 2022 and October 2024. The result: reels reach 36% more people than carousels on average, while carousels get 12% more interactions than reels (likes, comments, saves and shares). The single photo loses on both counts.

Socialinsider looked at 35 million posts from 447,613 accounts active in 2025. On interactions, carousels are slightly ahead: an average rate of 0.55% per post against 0.52% for reels, with single photos stuck at 0.37%. On average views, though, the surprise is something else: carousels beat reels in every follower range. For an account with 10,000 to 50,000 followers, that means 4,275 average views for a carousel against 2,460 for a reel.

Why do two studies this large disagree?

Because they measure different things, in different years, on different accounts. Buffer counts the people reached and uses data from people who publish with its tool, up to 2024. Socialinsider counts average views, on a much larger sample and with 2025 data. In the meantime Instagram changed its rules several times.

The useful point for a business is that both are averages. They include shops, influencers, soccer teams, newspapers. An average across hundreds of thousands of accounts tells you what happens in general and almost nothing about what will happen to the account of a car repair shop in Bergamo or a furniture maker in Brianza. Choosing a format by looking only at those numbers means copying someone else's behavior.

What does a reel do that a carousel doesn't?

The reel is the format Instagram uses to bring content to people who don't follow an account yet. A feature introduced in December 2024 shows this clearly: trial reels. Anyone with at least 1,000 followers and a public account can post a reel that is shown at first only to people who don't follow them. After about 24 hours they see how it did and decide whether to show it to their own followers too.

Since January 2025, a reel can also run up to 3 minutes, compared with 90 seconds before. This opens room for longer stories, but it doesn't change the rule of the first few seconds: a video that doesn't hold viewers right away gets shown to fewer people. In January 2025 Mosseri named watch time as one of the three signals that carry the most weight, along with likes and private sends.

For a business, then, the reel is the tool for getting found by people who don't know it exists today. It works when it shows something you understand with your eyes: a product that goes together in ten seconds, a before-and-after of a job, a person explaining a mistake customers make without realizing it.

What does a carousel do that a reel doesn't?

A carousel is read at your own pace. Whoever opens it can stop on a slide, go back, save it for later. Socialinsider confirms this: carousels are the format that collects the most saves. Since August 2024 they can hold up to 20 photos and videos, twice as many as before.

It is the right format when something needs explaining that would go too fast out loud: a comparison between two solutions, the steps of a job, the numbers of a case. And because of the second cover Mosseri talked about, slide two matters almost as much as the first: it has to stand on its own, because for some people it will be their first contact with the post.

So what should a business choose?

Our reading, as a Category Design agency, is that the choice of format comes after another decision: what specific thing the business wants to be remembered for. If that isn't clear, reels and carousels become two different ways of saying nothing, and the account ends up looking like its competitors'. If it is clear, the format is chosen post by post, based on the job.

• Getting discovered by people who don't know the business: a reel, short, with the strongest thing in the first few seconds.
• Explaining why the business works differently: a carousel, one idea per slide, with the second slide built as a second cover.
• Being remembered: both, repeating the same idea with different words and images until people link it to the business without thinking.

On Project Mantra's account we use the two formats this way: the reels tell in one minute how a brand won or lost its game, the carousels take a case apart slide by slide. The underlying message is the same; what changes is the job each post does. Anyone who wants to understand where that message starts will find the method in the guide to Category Design.

To judge the results, the numbers to watch are the ones Mosseri pointed to in January 2025: average watch time, likes per reach, sends per reach. They should be compared across posts on the same account, not against the averages in the studies.

What mistakes do businesses make most often with the two formats?

The first is turning the carousel into a flyer: ten slides of catalog, the logo on every one and no reason to reach the third. The second is using the reel like a cut-down TV commercial, with the brand showing up at the start and the substance at the end, when the viewer has already scrolled away.

The third is choosing the format because it's fashionable, convinced that switching is enough to grow. When an account is small, the format matters less than people think. In Socialinsider's table for accounts with 1,000 to 5,000 followers, the average number of saves per post is 1 for reels, 1 for carousels and 1 for single photos.

Two words, one of them flipped. Anyone who has heard “fast food” understands “slow food” without an explanation, and also understands which side it is on.

Why does the category name matter more than the brand name?

Because it is the word customers search with. Nobody, the first time around, searches for the name of a company they don't know. They search for the name of the thing they need. And the name of that thing decides who you will be compared with. If a customer describes you as “a marketing agency,” they will compare you with marketing agencies, at marketing agency prices.

In our guide to Category Design we explained that a new category starts from a problem the market has not named yet. The name is the moment that problem becomes a word people can repeat. A brand name helps people recognize you; a category name helps them recognize the problem. You are the one who uses the first. Everyone else has to use the second, or it doesn't work.

When do you choose the name of a new category?

At the end. First you define the problem, then who has it, then how the solution differs from the ones that already exist. Only then do you look for the word.

The order matters because people who start from the name almost always end up describing their own product. The product is what the company knows best, so it is the first thing that comes to mind. But customers don't know the product. They know their problem. A name that describes the product forces them to translate, and almost nobody does.

The lakehouse case shows this well. On January 30, 2020, five authors at Databricks, an American data software company, published a post titled “What is a Lakehouse?”. The text opens with an observation about customers: a new way of organizing data that had emerged independently at many of them, in different situations. The name comes after the phenomenon has been described, and it is defined as an open system that combines the best elements of data lakes and data warehouses.

What makes a good category name?

Looking at the names that have lasted, a few traits keep coming back. None of them is a written rule. This is our reading of what they have in common.

It makes sense in words the customer already knows. “Lakehouse” works because people who work with data knew both halves. James Dixon, then chief technology officer at Pentaho, introduced “data lake” on October 14, 2010, with a comparison anyone could follow: if a store of organized data is bottled water, clean and packaged, a data lake is a large body of water in its natural state. Data warehouse, the store for organized data, was an even older term. Databricks didn't have to teach anyone a new word. It glued two old ones together.

It says what it is pushing against. Slow food says fast food without naming it. “Inbound marketing,” the term coined by Brian Halligan, who founded HubSpot with Dharmesh Shah in June 2006, does the same thing with traditional marketing, in our reading: “inbound” means incoming, customers who arrive on their own instead of being chased. A name with an implied opponent does half the explaining, because the customer already knows the problem and links it to the word you are setting yourself against.

It can be used like any other word. On December 17, 1997, Jorn Barger coined “weblog.” In May 1999 Peter Merholz, as a joke, split the word into “we blog.” In 2004 the American dictionary Merriam-Webster chose “blog” as its word of the year. In less than seven years the word had been shortened, turned into a verb and taken to the top of a dictionary by people who had nothing to do with whoever invented it. A category name you can't shorten, conjugate or drop into a casual conversation rarely makes it out of company presentations.

It leaves room for others. To a customer, a category with only one company in it is a product. The name has to work for anyone selling something similar, and for the people who assess the market. In 2005 two Gartner analysts, Mark Nicolett and Amrit Williams, introduced the acronym SIEM for a type of cybersecurity software. It combined two categories that already existed, security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM). The name didn't belong to any vendor, and our reading is that this is exactly why every vendor could adopt it.

Is it better to invent a word or combine existing ones?

It is almost always better to combine words that already exist. A word invented from scratch has to be learned first, then understood, then remembered. A word built from familiar parts skips the first step.

The history of the Italian language says the same. “Agriturismo” is agriculture plus tourism, and anyone hearing it for the first time understands what it means. With Law no. 730 of December 5, 1985, titled “Rules on agritourism,” the word entered national law. When a category ends up in the title of a law, it has stopped being someone's idea and become the way an entire country names a thing.

Invented words make sense when the thing looks like nothing people know and there is time, and budget, to teach them. For a midsize company selling to customers who are short on time, the math usually doesn't work.

Can the category name be the same as the brand name?

It is the strongest temptation, and the most expensive one. The idea is simple: if the category is named after me, every time someone mentions it, they are advertising me. In practice the opposite often happens.

In 1900 the inventor Charles Seeberger registered the word “escalator” as a trademark for his moving staircase, and the following year he sold the rights to the Otis Elevator Company. Decades later a competitor, the Haughton Elevator Company, challenged the registration before the U.S. Patent Office. In 1950 the office ruled in its favor: the public recognized the word as the name of a moving staircase, not as an indication of who made it. “Escalator” became everyone's.

The reverse path leads to the same place. In the 1990s Psion had registered the trademark “Netbook,” tied to one of its older devices, the Netbook Pro. When the word began to describe small, inexpensive laptops from many manufacturers, Psion defended it as its own. In February 2009 Intel filed suit to free the word, and in June 2009 Psion voluntarily withdrew all its registrations. A company owned the name of the category, but not the category.

Our reading is this: the category name and the brand name do two different jobs, and it pays to keep them apart. The category has to be free, because the more people use it, the more real it becomes. The brand has to stay yours, and it grows strong when the market associates it with the category as its best example.

How do you test a name before using it?

Before you print a name on a website, it is worth putting it through a few simple checks. These are the ones we use at Project Mantra, and they don't require any special tools.

1. The sentence test. The name has to fit inside an ordinary sentence: “We're looking for a…,” “Have you ever tried a…?”. If it doesn't fit without sounding odd, nobody will use it.
2. The phone test. Say it out loud to someone in your industry, without explaining. If they ask you to repeat it or spell it, you have a pronunciation or spelling problem.
3. The competitor test. Picture your main competitor using your name in their advertising. If that feels natural, the name describes a category. If it feels like theft, you have written a product name.
4. The opposite test. Ask yourself which existing word your name stands against. If there is no answer, the customer will have nothing to compare it with, and you will have to explain everything from scratch.
5. The search test. Type the name into a search engine. If the first results are about something else, or if the name is already someone's registered trademark, start over.

Then there is a test you can only run later: the name works when other people use it. Halligan and Shah's book, “Inbound Marketing,” came out in 2009. By July 2011 it was in its seventh printing, with 40,000 copies sold and translations in nine languages, and the founders had built a movement around the term, including a conference, INBOUND. The name had left the company.

What are the most common mistakes in naming a category?

Using an acronym only you understand. SIEM worked because it combined two acronyms the industry already used. A new acronym the customer can't decode is one more obstacle.

Naming a feature instead of a problem. “Faster,” “smart,” “advanced” describe a better product inside a category that already exists. The customer hears an adjective and compares it with the old product, at the old product's price.

Adding a number or a prefix to an old category. “2.0,” “next generation,” “smart” admit that the category is still the one it was before. If it really is, that's fine. But then it isn't a new category, and the signs that tell you so usually show up already in the reasons you lose customers.

Changing the name every year. A category name works by accumulation: every time someone repeats it, it becomes a little more real. Whoever changes it after the first campaign that doesn't work starts again from zero, and leaves the word free for whoever comes next.

Falling for the name before the thing exists. If the name promises a new category and the customer gets the same product as before, at the same price and with the same service, the name becomes proof that you overreached.

Does the name have to be in Italian?

It depends on how your customers already talk about the problem. Slow Food was born in Piedmont with an English name, and our reading is that this wasn't an affectation: the opponent, fast food, had an English name, and the wordplay only worked in the same language. Agriturismo was born in Italian because it spoke to people who lived and worked in the Italian countryside.

For a company that sells mainly in Italy, to customers who don't work in English, a clear Italian word is more likely to be repeated. In an industry that already speaks English, such as software or finance, an Italian word can sound like a translation and get dropped. The question to ask is simple: what words does the customer use today to describe the problem, when you aren't there listening?

The 1950 Otis decision added a detail worth remembering for anyone who wants their category to carry their own name. In the ruling, the office noted that Otis itself had used “escalator” as a generic term, both in several of its own patents and in its own advertising.

The reports from that day don't say who had access to the account or how it was set up. But the case brings to mind the first question to ask when you choose who will handle your social media: who holds the keys to the account, and who can take them back quickly? It is usually the last one people ask.

Agency, freelancer or someone in-house: what really changes?

The three options answer different needs, and price is only one of the criteria. It helps to start from three questions.

How much material needs to be produced? If the company already has photos and videos, or needs only a few, one person who writes, posts and replies may be enough. If every month calls for new footage, editing and graphics, one person on their own ends up either doing everything in a rush or recycling the same images over and over. In that case an agency that also has people to shoot and edit makes sense.

Who answers the messages? Comments and direct messages arrive on Saturdays too. According to the Sprout Social Index 2025, a survey of 4,044 consumers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, 73% say they will buy from a competitor if a brand doesn't respond on social media. The figure isn't Italian, but the question applies everywhere: who covers the days when the person in charge is on vacation?

Who decides what the company says? Someone in-house knows the product, the customers and the everyday problems, but is often also the person who answers the phone and prepares the shipments, and social media becomes the last task of the day. An outsider has more time and more craft, but needs someone at the company who approves, provides information and says no. Without that person, any agency is working blind.

Who owns the company's social media accounts?

The company, always. Said like that it sounds obvious, but it often happens that a page was opened by the owner's nephew or by the first employee, with their personal email, and years later nobody knows how to get it back.

The practical rules are few. The accounts and the Meta business portfolio, the space that brings together the Facebook page, the Instagram account and the ad accounts, should be created in the company's name, with a company email. Whoever runs the social media gets partner access, a Meta feature designed specifically for agencies: whoever has full control of the portfolio chooses which pages and accounts to share and at what level of access, and can remove the partner in the settings. The same goes for the material: the contract should state that photos, videos and copy produced for the company remain usable even if the collaboration ends.

The HMV case doesn't tell us how access to that account was managed. It is still a good reminder: who can revoke access, and how, is worth knowing before the day you need it.

How can you tell if the person pitching to you is any good?

In Italy there is no official register of social media managers. Law 4 of 2013, on professions not organized into orders or associations, says so explicitly: “the practice of the profession is free.” There is a technical standard, UNI 11483, updated in 2021 for professional communicators, with three levels (Junior, Expert and Senior). Like all UNI standards it is voluntary: having it is a signal, not having it doesn't say much.

Three things to ask at the first meeting count for more:

• Two projects done for companies similar to yours, with real accounts you can open, not just slides.
• Who does the work every day. At many agencies, the person who presents the project isn't the one who then posts and replies. That's fine, but you need to know it and meet them.
• A proposal on a real problem of yours. Half an hour is enough: you can tell who has understood the company from what they suggest not doing.

Which numbers should you ask for in the reports?

Followers are the easiest number to inflate and the least useful to watch. In the United States, a Federal Trade Commission rule announced on August 14, 2024, bans buying or selling followers and views generated by bots or hijacked accounts, when the buyer knows or should know they are fake and uses them to appear, for commercial purposes, more influential than they are. An agency that promises to “grow your followers” without saying how is a first warning sign.

On Instagram, the platform's head, Adam Mosseri, said in January 2025 which signals carry the most weight in deciding who gets shown a piece of content: watch time, likes and sends, meaning how many people pass the content on to someone in a private message. His advice, in his own words, was to look at “average watch time, likes per reach, and sends per reach.” Those are the numbers to ask for every month, along with response times to messages.

And then there is a number no tool measures: how many of the things posted a competitor could have posted just by swapping the logo.

What does the category have to do with social media?

This is where our reading comes in, that of a Category Design agency. Whoever runs your social media makes dozens of small decisions every week: which photo, which word, what to reply to, which trend to follow. If nobody has told them which category the company wants to be remembered in, they make those decisions by looking at competitors, and the account ends up looking like everyone else's in the industry.

That is why the right question to ask a candidate isn't “how many posts a month?” but “what would you say about us that our competitors can't say?”. If the answer is vague, the company's position probably is too, and it is worth clarifying that first. That is what we explain in the guide to Category Design; if you suspect you are competing on the wrong ground, there are five signs to check.

Trends of the moment should be read the same way. In the same Sprout Social survey, a third of consumers find it embarrassing when a brand jumps on viral trends. People who run social media well know when not to follow them.

What are the signs that you chose wrong?

Some show up in the quote itself: a package of posts per month that is the same for every client, no questions about the company's customers, a request for passwords instead of partner access. Others arrive after a few months: reports made only of followers and likes, messages left unanswered for days, posts that could sit on anyone's account.

None of these signs depends on whether your social media is run by a large agency, a freelancer or the youngest person in the office. It depends on who, at the company, has decided what it wants people to remember, and who holds the keys.

At HMV, while the posts about the layoffs were circulating on the official account, one of them quoted a line that, according to the person writing, the marketing director had just said in the office: “How do I shut down the Twitter?”

People who search “how much does a company video cost” often land on pages like this one and leave with a number that means nothing. The site isn't the problem. The problem is that the word “video” covers jobs that have nothing in common.

Is there an average price for a company video?

No, and distrusting anyone who gives you one without asking questions is already a good rule. Italy has no official price list or industry rate card for company videos. The figures that circulate online come from platforms that collect every kind of request, or from companies that sell do-it-yourself video tools and have an interest in showing how much the alternative costs.

Meanwhile the market is growing. According to the Internet Media Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano, online advertising in Italy should reach about €7 billion in 2026, with video formats accounting for 41%. The more companies ask for video, the wider the range of quotes: from the young freelancer with a single camera to the production company with thirty people on set.

The serious way to answer the question is to break the price down into its parts.

What does the price of a company video depend on?

The items are almost always the same. What changes is how much each one weighs.

Preparation. Writing what the video will say, choosing the locations, deciding the shots, organizing the day. It is the part the client sees least and the one that decides the most: a shooting day without preparation costs the same and brings home half as much.

Shooting days. The bill is calculated by the day, and each day is multiplied by the people on site: whoever films, whoever handles the lighting, whoever records the sound, whoever coordinates. A company video shot in a warehouse by one person costs a fraction of one shot at three locations with a team of five.

The people in front of the camera. An employee talking about their own work usually isn't paid separately. An actor is. As a rough guide, the national contract for film and audiovisual actors, in force since March 1, 2024, sets a minimum of €325 per shooting day and €1,100 for a lead. It isn't necessarily the contract that applies to a commercial, but it gives a sense of how much a professional face weighs.

Editing and graphics. Cutting, color correction, subtitles, animated text. Here the price grows with the number of versions: a horizontal video for the website, a vertical one for social media and a 15-second cut for advertising are three jobs, even if the footage is the same.

Rights. Music, stock footage, faces: each comes with a license that says where and for how long the video can be used. It is the item most often missing from low quotes.

What hidden costs are there in a video quote?

The ones that surface later, when the video is already finished and someone wants to use it in a way nobody planned for.

Music is the most common example. Music libraries sell different subscriptions depending on use: on Epidemic Sound, for instance, only the Pro and Enterprise plans cover advertising campaigns. So if the video ends up in a paid social ad, the right subscription is one of those two. The same reasoning applies to an actor paid for the website who then appears in a TV commercial.

Then there is the drone. Aerial footage has become an almost automatic request, but the pilot must hold the ENAC certificates suited to the type of flight. One of them, the A2 certificate, is obtained after the basic A1/A3 certificate, practical training and an exam with a fixed fee of €31. In a quote it is worth asking who will fly and with which certificate: if the “drone” line costs much less than the others, that is often where something is missing.

Finally, revisions. “Two rounds of changes included” and “unlimited changes” are two different prices, even if the number at the bottom is the same.

Does artificial intelligence bring the price down?

It brings down the price of images. With the standard version of Veo 3.1, Google's video generation model, one second of high-definition video with audio costs $0.40 at list price, or $24 per minute. The Lite version drops to $0.08 per second, under $5 per minute.

Our reading at Project Mantra is that this moves the value rather than wiping it out. When producing images costs almost nothing, anyone can fill a minute with beautiful shots, and in fact many company videos are starting to look alike: the drone over the plant, hands at work in slow motion, the voice talking about passion and quality. What stays expensive is deciding what to show so that customers understand something no competitor has ever made them understand.

It is the same problem we describe in the guide to Category Design: if a company presents itself with the words and images of its whole industry, customers compare it with the others on price. A video your nearest competitor could sign, whatever it costs, is a video that reinforces the wrong category.

How do you compare two quotes for a company video?

By sending everyone the same written brief, and asking for the price broken down by item. A useful brief says at least what the video needs to achieve, where it will be used (website, social media, trade shows, advertising, television), for how long, in how many formats and who appears in it.

With the items separated, quotes become readable. If one costs half as much as the other, you can usually see where right away: one shooting day fewer, nobody on sound, music not licensed for advertising, a single version instead of three. Sometimes the cut is fine, sometimes it isn't, but it is a choice made knowing what you are giving up.

The last question to ask is who wrote what the video will say. In many quotes that line isn't there, or it is a one-hour meeting. At Google's list price, $24 pays for one minute of high-definition images. None of those 24 dollars pays for the decision about what to put in them.

The product had nothing wrong with it. It was stuck in a small box: convalescence. And companies selling inside the wrong box rarely notice by looking at the product, because the product is fine. They notice through stranger signs, which at first look like sales or communication problems. We counted five.

Does price always come up first?

You hear the first sign in negotiations. The customer asks for the price before asking anything else, and the conversation stays there until the end.

It doesn't mean the customer is stingy. It means they've already put you in a box where the alternatives look the same, and when the alternatives are the same the only thing left to compare is the number at the bottom of the quote. Lowering your price at that moment confirms what they think: you're one of many, and the cheapest too.

As we read it, price as the first topic is a symptom, not the disease. The useful question isn't “how far do I need to drop?” but “who are they comparing me with, and why do they think we're the same?”

Do customers compare you with companies that aren't like you?

The second sign is subtler. You hear “but the other company does the same thing for less,” and “the other company” works differently, for different customers, with different results. You see the difference; the customer doesn't.

It happens when the category the customer is searching in is wider than the one you actually work in. Until the 1980s Lucozade was sold mainly in pharmacies: as we read it, it was being compared with the things you take when you're ill. In 1983 the brand was relaunched as an energy and sports drink, precisely to shake off its association with illness. A plastic bottle replaced the glass one and a new slogan arrived, “Lucozade replaces lost energy.” The first new flavors, orange and lemon, followed in 1986. The first face of the ads was Daley Thompson, Olympic decathlon champion. Between 1984 and 1989 UK sales tripled, to almost £75 million.

The name had stayed the same. What had changed was its neighbor on the shelf, and with it the comparison.

Does your best work earn compliments but no inquiries?

Third sign: you publish a successful project, a client case, a new product. Comments come in, pats on the back, “beautiful.” Then nothing. Nobody calls asking for the same thing.

It's an easy sign to misread, because it looks like success. We read it differently: if the work is liked but doesn't create a need, the people looking at it don't recognize a problem of their own in what you solved. They admire it the way you admire something well made for someone else.

Procter & Gamble found this out with Febreze. The spray, which could remove odors from fabrics, went into test markets in March 1996 and sold poorly. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains why: people who live in a house that smells, with nine cats for example, stop noticing the smell. That's why nobody used Febreze: customers no longer sensed the problem the product solved. The line that sums up the case, in Duhigg's account, is this one: “No one craves scentlessness.”

P&G changed boxes. In Duhigg's telling, the new ads showed freshly made beds and freshly washed clothes: Febreze stopped being the cure for bad smells and became the scent you spray as a finishing touch, when things are already clean. In 2010 the brand passed $1 billion in revenue worldwide.

Do you explain what you do better than why to choose you?

Fourth sign: when someone asks what you do, you answer in ten seconds. When they ask why they should choose you, you start a list: quality, experience, customer care, reliability. Those are the same words your competitor would use.

When “why you” takes a list, it usually means there's no reason inside the current box that belongs only to you. The work we describe in our guide to Category Design starts right here: finding the customer problem nobody is naming, and building the box around it.

The story of light beer in the United States shows the difference well. In December 1966 the Rheingold brewery in New York launched Gablinger's, a beer with a third fewer calories. Meister Brau Lite followed in May 1967, in Chicago. According to Wikipedia's account, the first light beer makers went after health-conscious customers, many of them women, who drank little beer. Also according to Wikipedia, before Miller Lite light beer sales in the United States were negligible.

In 1972 Miller bought the Lite brand. It had noticed that Meister Brau Lite sold well in Anderson, Indiana, even among workers who drank a lot, and decided to aim at people who drink plenty of beer. It spent more than a year testing 30 recipes, put the beer on sale in four cities in 1973, and in 1975 took it nationwide with a major advertising campaign. The promise was now enjoyment: good and less heavy, “Tastes great, less filling,” as the campaign that stayed with the beer for years put it. The ads featured former athletes such as Ray Nitschke, Ben Davidson and Bubba Smith. By 2002 light beer accounted for 44% of the American market.

Is your marketing working harder and harder for less and less?

Fifth sign, and the most expensive. Every year you need more budget for the same leads, more discounts to close the same contracts, more content to get noticed. The numbers don't collapse: they wear down slowly.

It's the sign most often treated with the wrong medicine, namely more marketing. As we read it, when you push a product into a crowded box, every euro you spend also helps grow attention for the whole box, competitors included. Again as we read it, the first light beers are an example: by talking about health to people who drank little beer, every message reinforced the idea that light beer wasn't for people who really drink beer.

We've also written about this in why the best product isn't enough: the spec sheet matters less than the field in which it's read.

How many signs should worry you?

A single one can have a thousand explanations: a difficult customer, a bad year, a new salesperson. Two or more that keep coming back for months, in our experience at Project Mantra, almost always tell the same story: the company is working hard to win a game in which it starts at a disadvantage.

As we read it, in none of the three cases was it enough to improve the product or raise the volume. Miller also changed the recipe, but light beer had been on sale since 1966, nine years before Miller Lite went nationwide: what made the difference, in our view, was the audience it was aimed at. Lucozade changed its audience, Febreze its moment of use, Miller the reason to buy.