Is Mark Zuckerberg a marketing CEO?
And what is a “marketing CEO” any way?
The short answer is YES. Mark Zuckerberg is a marketing CEO in the most powerful way. For two reasons:
- He designed a new market category, which he now dominates
- He’s knows that the “E” in CEO is for evangelist. And just like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates (in his heyday) and Marc Benioff, Zuckerberg is an outstanding evangelist
The slightly longer answer is — the most legendary marketers do not play someone else’s game. They create their own. They design the market. They understand the axiom, the company that designs the space is best positioned to dominate it.
Mark is a category designer.
Category design is the ability to shift markets to embrace new products and innovations. It is arguably the most important skill in business. No category, no market no innovation, no revenue.
Category design is a new, cross-functional management discipline that increases the odds of winning by teaching business leaders how to build a product, company and category at the same time. Category design provides a fresh, market oriented, new lens into what it takes to build a business that endures.
- A category designer is anyone who chooses not to compete in an existing market and create their own.
- A category designer is anyone who has re-imagined an existing market with a different point of view and made it their own.
- A category designer is anyone who has tried to introduce the world to a new way of living, learning or working.
Zuckerberg didn’t just create a product. He created a whole new paradigm for communication — solving problems we didn’t know we had. As a result, his vision for social networking became the definition of social networking. And a giant new category emerged.
This is what legendary “marketing CEOs” have always done. For example, Henry Ford did not compete with the horse and buggy. He taught the world to think differently about how to get around. He had a vision. To solve a transportation problem. In a way that no one else figured out.
Ford did not market the automobile as a product. He marketed his unique point and view on the future of transportation. And when people bought the point of view, they bought the automobile. And then a giant new transportation category emerged. Ford designed a new market category for his new product. And changed the world. Zuckerberg has been doing the same thing.
Now Zuckerberg & Co are doing it again by unveiling a new blueprint at F8 in April 2016.
For more on this listen to our steezy podcast on this topic.
By publicly announcing a blueprint Facebook declared its vision for the future of their products, company and the entire social networking category. Facebook went beyond discussing a “product road map” which details how a product will evolve. They issued what you could think of as a category blueprint.
A category blueprint is an agenda for an entire market. It sets the context for how we think about an entire class of products. It’s not just a promise of what a company will deliver, but a vision for how a whole category of solutions will address customer problems in new and innovative ways over time.
People want to know that their leaders have a vision, direction and plan. With their category blueprint Facebook’s communicating the vision for their products, company and entire category. And that is exactly what legendary marketing CEOs do.
Hope that helps.
Best wishes for legendary success & play bigger,
christopher
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