Category Design Tip: The Most Elegant & Effective Holiday Gifting Strategy

3 ways to leverage gifting to build your category and evangelize your POV.

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

This week’s Category Design Tip is about the greatest category marketing event ever.

Christmas.

Which begs the question…

How can you take advantage of the holiday season and Christmas “gifting” as a marketing strategy to make your product highly giftable?

Grab yourself a hot toddy, and come join us on the deck…

To chart your own category course (our mini-books are the best maps), hop aboard The Pirate Ship and subscribe below:

3 Ways To Use Gifting And Turn The Holidays Into A Lightning Strike Event

In our mini-book The Christmas Gift Growth Strategy, we share the most effective gifting strategy to get people to learn about and engage with your company. This includes three ways to leverage gifting:

1. Corporate Gifting

2. Consumer Gifting

3. Superconsumer Gifting

For each group, you can use gifting to build your category and evangelize your POV.

1. Corporate Gifting

$258 billion is spent each year on corporate gifting.

But when was the last time you received a corporate gift that changed your life? The truth is, most corporate gifting does a poor job of achieving your goals as a category designer. So you have to make the gift matter.

(Like when Pirate Christopher gifted Pirate Eddie an axe.)

This season, think deeper and ask:

• What’s the greatest gift you could possibly give someone—not in terms of value, but meaning?

• What’s a gift that would inspire that person to tell everyone they know about what they received?

• What’s a gift where, if a friend or family member saw it, they wouldn’t be able to restrain themselves from asking, “Dear Lord, where on earth did you get that?”

Giving a legendary gift requires thought, intention, and effort. But it’s something the person will remember forever.

2. Consumer Gifting & Promotions

Too many companies believe consumers want another gadget with their brand on it.

Wrong.

That’s because these gifts don’t meet the Category Design Gifting Checklist:

• Does this gift reinforce the company’s mission & POV? No.

• Does this gift turn “regular consumers” into Superconsumers? No.

• Does this gift show you truly understand the wants, needs, struggles, and desires of your consumers? No.

There are two ways to think about consumer gifting:

1. Tell people why they should gift your product.

2. Find creative ways to turn some aspect of what you do (and what customers truly find valuable) into a gift.

Remember: Tesla sells electric vehicles, but that didn’t stop Elon Musk from creating Teslaquila —a luxury, limited-run tequila product in a bottle shaped like a lightning bolt.

3. Superconsumer Gifting

Superconsumers can drive between 30% and 70% of sales.

Your job is to create a gifting strategy that allows your Supers to be your elves this Christmas.

It is all about empowering them to educate (with your category POV) someone who isn’t already in your category and take pride and ownership in onboarding that new consumer. For example, an easy way to better leverage iPhone Supers would be to create a free guide teaching them how to be the best category evangelists they can be. Think: “11 Steps To Help Uncle Jeff Transfer Photos To His New iPhone This Christmas.”

But you can’t just “hope” it happens.

No matter the group, you need to make sure your product is highly giftable.

What people need is usually bigger, more expensive, and not as easy to gift.

This is why we explain how to make even the most ungiftable products (like a car or financial services) a part of the holiday season in our mini-book, The Christmas Gift Growth Strategy.

Because if you don’t have a gifting strategy, you need to rethink your holiday plans.

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Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates

Eddie Yoon

Nicolas Cole

Christopher Lochhead

PS: Don’t forget to grab a copy (or gift!) of one of our best-selling books:

• ❄️ Snow Leopard: How Legendary Writers Create A Category Of One

• ⚒️ The Category Design Toolkit: Beyond Marketing: 15 Frameworks For Creating & Dominating Your Niche

• 📣 A Marketer's Guide To Category Design: How To Escape The "Better" Trap, Dam The Demand, And Launch A Lightning Strike Strategy

PPS: Sign up for (or share) our free 7-Day Category Accelerator email course.

The course walks you through the fundamentals of Category Design and gets you up to speed quickly, so you can start “thinking different.” To learn more, click here.