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The Intersection of Community + Category Design
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The Intersection of Community + Category Design

Jenny Weigle
Apr 5, 2022
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Share this post
The Intersection of Community + Category Design
jennydotcommunity.substack.com

After 10+ years working in the field of online communities, I’m always on the lookout for something new, different, and dynamic about this work. My curiosity was sparked when my friend Pablo Gonzalez turned me on to the book Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney. It’s a fascinating read about business, innovation, category design, and category kings. As I read it, I could hear and see the importance of Community in almost every example, even when Community wasn’t explicitly discussed. This book left me intrigued and questioning things…

Where does Community come into the picture in the process of category design? How essential is it to today’s category designers? Which of the category kings currently have dedicated online Communities (not just social media accounts)? 

Let me back up a little though to bring you up to speed, because you’re probably wondering “What the heck is Jenny talking about?” Some definitions, from Play Bigger:

Category Design: The process of defining and planning out a new business category. Play Bigger covers this entire process. 

Category King: “The most exciting companies create. They give us new ways of living, thinking, or doing business, many times solving a problem we didn’t know we had—or a problem we didn’t pay attention to because we never thought there was another way…They don’t sell us better. The most exciting companies sell us different. They introduce the world to a new category of product or service…” Examples include: Uber’s on-demand transportation and Salesforce’s software-as-a-service. Category Kings are not always the FIRST to create a category, but because they offer something different, they dominate the category.

As I read through the book, I documented each category king company that was mentioned. Then, I conducted a little research to find which of them have a Community today. What I found was that approximately half of the category kings mentioned in the book have active Communities today. IMHO, that can’t be a coincidence. There’s synergy between Community and category design, and I’ll be exploring that more in future posts here on Substack. In the meantime, check out the list below of category kings and their communities. 

(Note: Every company listed below has been a category king at some time and not all are still kings today. Also, the communities listed are only what was available via public search. It’s possible there are more communities that are private.) 

**By the way, if anyone knows of any communities for category designers, please do let me know!**

Adobe (bought Macromedia, a category king)

  • Adobe Support Communities

Airbnb

  • Host Community

Alphabet/Google/YouTube

  • Google Cloud Community

  • Google Ads Help Community

  • Google Local Guides Connect

  • YouTube Help Community

Amazon/Amazon Web Services

  • AWS Community

Apple 

  • Apple Support Community

Atlassian 

  • Atlassian Community

Cisco

  • Cisco Community

CNN

  • CNN+ Interview Club

Fitbit 

  • Fitbit Community

GoPro

  • GoPro Support Community

IBM

  • IBM Community

Microsoft

  • Microsoft Power BI Community

  • Microsoft Tech Community

  • Microsoft Answers Community

Oracle/NetSuite/Siebel

  • NetSuite Support Community

  • Oracle Communities

  • Siebel Hub

Red Hat

  • Red Hat Learning Community

SAP

  • SAP Community

Salesforce/Tableau/Slack

  • Salesforce Trailhead Community

  • Tableau Community

  • Slack Community

ServiceNow

  • ServiceNow Community

SpaceX

  • SpaceX Community (not affiliated with the company)

Starbucks

  • Leaf Rakers Society

  • Starbucks Alumni Community

Tesla Motors

  • Tesla Motors Club (not affiliated with the company)

VMware

  • VMware Communities

Workday

  • Workday Customer Community

Xerox

  • Xerox Customer Support Forum

UPDATE 4/20/22: Click here to read the second post in my series on Community + Category Design.


Giveaway 🎉🎉🎉

**UPDATE: The 3 free copies have been claimed. Congrats to Philippa, Hannah, and Valentina!**

If you’ve read this far, it’s your lucky day! In celebration of my birthday, I want to gift 3 free copies of Play Bigger to my subscribers. Be one of the first 3 subscribers to respond to this email with “I want to know more about category design!” and I’ll be in touch to provide you with your complimentary copy. (Selfishly, I’m hoping more community professionals will read this book and want to have deep discussions with me on how community and category design work together.) Please know that I will be double-checking my subscriber list to ensure that anyone who emails me is definitely on it.

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The Intersection of Community + Category Design
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10 Comments
Philippa
Apr 5, 2022Liked by Jenny Weigle

“I want to know more about category design!” Loving you, Philippa Gillström

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J Thomson
Apr 5, 2022Liked by Jenny Weigle

I’d love to read/learn more about this :)

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