Note: If your business is in a category that is new, companies often have to spend a lot of time explaining what they do…long before they sell the virtues of their company. A book that speaks to this situation is “Crossing the Chasm.” It explains how there is a chasm that many new products and services fall into as their category develops and suggests strategies to cross the “chasm” from a niche to being a mainstream category. The Apple Newton fell into such a chasm. It was loved by techies but not by the mainstream market.

One of the keys in any new category is a simple name that is descriptive and becomes broadly used. Apple called the Newton a PDA (what’s that?) If they had called it an electronic organizer more people would have understood what it was. Also, the Newton had no competitors to validate the category…so it was a flash-in-the-pan. Emergence of strong, credible competitors in a category also speed maturity of the category. The best thinker on categories is Jack Trout, author of many marketing and strategy books as well as a columnist on Forbes.com