What is a category king (and how do you become one)?

On July 8, 1998, Larry Page signed off a message to the “Google Friends” mailing list with the line “Have fun and keep googling!” Google the company didn't exist yet: it would be founded on September 4, almost two months later. AltaVista, on the other hand, had been online since December 15, 1995. Eight years later, in June 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary added “google” as a verb; Merriam-Webster followed in July.

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.