Christopher Lochhead
Don't compete for a market. Create the market, name it, and take two-thirds of its economics.
- Name
- Christopher Lochhead
- CMO
- Mercury Interactive, Scient, Vantive
- Key work
- Play Bigger (2016, co-author)
- Now
- Category Pirates newsletter
Forms & parts of speech
Who he is, in plain terms
Christopher Lochhead is the three-time Silicon Valley CMO (Mercury Interactive through its $4.5B HP acquisition, Scient, Vantive) who became category design's chief evangelist — co-author of Play Bigger (2016) and Niche Down, co-creator of the Category Pirates newsletter with Eddie Yoon and Nicolas Cole, and host of one of marketing's longest-running podcasts.
The key ideas
Category kings take roughly two-thirds of a category's economics (the Play Bigger team's analysis of tech companies), so the design of the category matters more than the quality of the product; category design's toolkit — name the problem before the solution, frame-storm a POV (point of view) that makes the old way obsolete, and "dam the demand" of the existing category; languaging — whoever names the thing frames the thing; and the niche-down corollary: the fastest route to king is a category small enough to own outright.
Why he still matters
"Category creation" went from pitch-deck garnish to funded strategy largely on this drumbeat — Salesforce's "no software," HubSpot's "inbound," Gong's "revenue intelligence" are taught as category designs now. His Ries-and-Trout inheritance is explicit but radicalized: positioning fights for a slot in an existing mind-map, category design redraws the map.
Synonyms & antonyms
Synonyms
Origin & history
A Montreal-born dyslexic who dropped out of school at 18, talked his way into tech marketing, and rode three CMO seats to the Mercury-HP exit. Play Bigger (2016, with Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, and Kevin Maney) coined "category design" as a discipline name.
Etymology: source.
Usage trends
Search interest for this term over the last five years:
Common questions
- Who is Christopher Lochhead?
- Three-time Silicon Valley CMO, co-author of Play Bigger, and the leading evangelist of category design.
- What is a category king?
- The company that defines a category and captures the large majority of its economics — the central claim of Play Bigger.
- How does category design differ from positioning?
- Positioning competes for a slot in an existing mental map. Category design creates and names a new map.
Related tools & calculators
- toolCAC calculator
- toolLTV-to-CAC ratio
Resources & people to follow
- bookPlay Bigger — Ramadan, Peterson, Lochhead & Maney
- referenceCategory Pirates — his newsletter
- referenceLochhead.com — podcast archive
Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.
Related training
Disciplines
Areas of marketing where christopher lochhead is a core concern: