Understanding the Category
Lesson 2: Design Influence ePlaybook (Preview) - Gain momentum & fast-track your influence!
Welcome back to Lesson 2 of the Design Influence Playbook. This month, we’re all about Thinking Like a Strategist. These quick, bite-sized lessons are designed to be applied immediately to your workflow.
Whether you’re a designer or a design director, these lessons delivered in newsletter form make it easy to integrate best-in-class practices into your approach. It might be something new—or just a useful reminder.
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Built from my real-world experiences, training, and stories, these lessons are practical, relatable, and ready to use.
In this lesson, we’ll focus on understanding the category you’re designing for—a crucial step in creating meaningful, effective solutions.
Let’s get started!
Competitive Advantage Starts with Context
If Driving Clarity (Lesson 1) is the strategic contract with your client, then Understanding the Category is the strategic territory where you execute the work.
You can have a perfectly clear objective, but if you don’t understand the rules, habits, and assumptions of the market you’re entering, you’re designing in a vacuum. The category isn’t just a place on a shelf; it’s a dense, complex ecosystem of consumer behavior and visual language.
As strategists, we must move beyond aesthetics and understand the context that dictates consumer decisions. Ignorance of the category is not bliss, it’s wasted time and diluted impact. As strategists, we start with the context.
Context of a category includes category drivers, norms that the consumer has come to expect, points of parity and points of difference, size, amount of growth and disruption, tiers (low tiers and higher tiers), point of entry value pricing vs. premium, what’s trending, and consumer habits for that category.
To win, you must understand three things about the category:
What consumers expect
What competitors prioritize, and
What visual cues signal product benefits and trust.
This knowledge allows you to strategically decide where to fit in and, more importantly, where to stand out.
Your Strategic Deep Dive: Three Pillars
A successful category audit, the one that truly informs design strategy, focuses on these three interdependent pillars:
1. The Shopper Mindset (The Decision Tree)
This is about understanding the psychological journey of the person buying your product. Design doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it happens in the store aisle or on a digital feed.
Habits & Needs: What are the non-negotiable functional or emotional needs driving the purchase? Is this an impulse buy, a planned replenishment, or a complex consideration?
The Decision Tree: Map out the mental process. What’s the first thing they look for (e.g., brand, flavor, price)? What visual signals simplify the choice? Your design must strategically interrupt or simplify this flow.
2. The Competitive Landscape (The White Space)
You cannot design for differentiation until you know the norm. Analyze your core competitors and the indirect players impacting the consumer’s decision.
The Visual Census: Group competitors by common visual strategies (e.g., are they mostly minimalist and white, or bold and colorful?).
Identify the Void: Where is the emotional or visual territory that no one has claimed? This white space is your opportunity for strategic disruption.
3. Category Cues (The Visual Language)
Every category has visual shorthand that instantly communicates what a product is and does. These are the non-negotiable cues that, if ignored, cause confusion and distrust.
The Non-Negotiables (Hard Cues): Think of a dairy product needing a cow, or a high-end beauty product using a minimalist font. These cues signal functionality, safety, and relevance.
The Flexible Points (Soft Cues): These are the colors, textures, or stylistic elements you can stretch to achieve differentiation.
Your strategic job is to honor the hard cues enough to be understood, but disrupt the soft cues enough to be noticed.
Category Audit Checklist: Your Lesson 2 Action Plan
Use this checklist to structure your deep dive and ensure you have all the necessary context before defining your creative mandate (Lesson 3). Use it with your briefing team to ensure their existing knowledge is documented and aligned.
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Design Influence ePlaybook - bite- size lessons to gain momentum & fast-track your influence!
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