The category that has to be built first
Too much brand strategy assumes the category is already there. The task is to find a distinctive position within it, to articulate a proposition that differentiates from competitors, to build a brand that customers can recognise and choose. The frameworks we use, the briefs we write, the diagnostic questions we ask, they all sit on top of an unspoken assumption that the consumer already knows what sort of a thing the thing they’re being offered actually is.
For a meaningful and growing share of consumer categories, this assumption is wrong. Specialty coffee in the early 2000s. Plant-based meat alternatives ten years ago. Functional health and personalised nutrition now. Non-alcoholic spirits. Adult cycling as a cultural identity rather than a school commute. Premium pet nutrition. Pilates as a serious adult practice rather than a niche of dance and rehabilitation. Each of these is a category that didn't really exist in the consumer's mind before someone built it.
What's true of these categories is that the standard brand development doesn't work. The consumer can't choose between Brand A and Brand B in a category they don't yet understand. Differentiation can't operate when no one has a working framework for what's being differentiated. Awareness campaigns don't help when awareness isn't the problem. Comprehension is. The strategic work, in these categories, is fundamentally different. It isn't to position the brand within a market. It's to build the market the brand will then operate in.
This is harder, slower and more capital intensive or bootstrap requiring work than conventional brand-building. It involves educating consumers from a near-zero base sometimes over a period of years. It rmeans building “infrastructure” as well as products and services. Communities, certifications, distribution, supply chains, structures that doesn't yet exist or are currently only nascent. It often means partnering with organisations that aren't customers (bartenders, baristas, instructors, practitioners, retailers or even other companies on the same category journey) before the consumer relationship can develop. And it usually means accepting that the category-building work will benefit competitors who arrive later, when the category is established and the hard work of comprehension is done.
I find this work fascinating, partly for professional reasons and partly because, like most people who are passionate about brands and branding, the categories I've been most aware of as a consumer are ones I've cared about as an enthusiast first. The argument here is shaped by twenty years of watching specialty coffee, food and drink brands, and a couple of more personal interests evolve from niche to mainstream. The patterns are remarkably consistent across them.
Category creation: Coffee
Take speciality coffee (an area that has enhanced my life and at times drained my bank balance in ways I can’t always explain t myself). The category as it exists today, single-origin sourcing, brewing methods elevated to craft, baristas as trained practitioners, an entire vocabulary that includes terms like cupping, pourover, and direct trade, didn't exist in any popular form thirty years ago. In the US, it was substantially built by a small group of roasters in the early 2000s: Stumptown (founded 1999 in Portland), Intelligentsia (Chicago), Counter Culture (Durham). They visited coffee farms in person, paid above-market prices for higher quality beans, trained baristas in technique, and helped invent the whole third wave framing as a meaningful category distinct from what Starbucks and Peet's had built before them.
In the UK, the lineage is even more interesting. The parent of the scene is arguably Monmouth Coffee Company, founded in 1978 by Anita Le Roy and Nick Saunders. Monmouth was roasting single origin coffees and selling them from a Covent Garden basement when most British coffee drinking was instant Nescafé and most cafe coffee was either Italian style espresso or, well, just not that good. The Borough Market stall opened in 1999. What's striking, in retrospect, is how much of the next generation of London specialty coffee was trained at Monmouth. Gwilym Davies, who went on to co-found Prufrock and win the 2009 World Barista Championship; Jorge Fernandez, who went on to found Fernandez and Wells; numerous others. Monmouth wasn't just selling coffee. It was, accidentally and then deliberately, training the people who would build the next phase of the category.
That next phase, in London, is often associated with Prufrock, the Leather Lane café opened in 2009 by Davies, Jeremy Challender and Klaus Kunke. Prufrock became the place where new ideas about brewing, espresso preparation, and barista craft got tested and refined. And from Prufrock specifically, a particular figure emerged who would do more than almost anyone else to scale category building from physical to digital: James Hoffmann.
Hoffmann won the World Barista Championship in 2007, co-founded Square Mile Coffee Roasters in 2008, and eventually took over Prufrock through Square Mile in 2017. But his most consequential category-building work has been educational and digital. His World Atlas of Coffee (now in its second edition) is genuinely the single text most likely to be on the shelf of someone serious about coffee. His YouTube channel has over 2.5 million subscribers. Which is to say, a coffee education audience larger than most national newspapers. He has, through a combination of books, video, blog, podcast, and an unusual degree of generosity in sharing what he knows, connected the third-wave coffee category to millions of people who would never set foot in Prufrock.
The pattern from Le Roy at Monmouth in 1978 to Hoffmann on YouTube in 2025 is essentially the same pattern: patient, education led category building, mostly done by people who care more about the craft than about brand building in any conventional sense.
Next wave spirits
A more recent example, also UK led: Seedlip. Ben Branson launched the brand in 2015 as the world's first distilled non-alcoholic spirit, positioned not against soft drinks but against the conventional cocktail. The early commercial strategy was striking. Rather than push the product into supermarkets where the consumer would have had no framework for understanding what it was — Branson worked with high-end bars, restaurants, and hotels to establish the product within an environment where consumers were already paying attention to drinks craft. In just three years, he said in 2019, we have created a new category. The category-building work involved educating bartenders to make non-alcoholic cocktails, working with brand designers to invent what he called category language for a category that didn't yet exist, and patiently establishing the legitimacy of non-alcoholic distillates as a serious option for grown-up drinkers. By the time Diageo bought a majority stake in 2019, the category had infrastructure: hundreds of bars, dedicated cocktail menus, a vocabulary, a community of bartenders treating the products seriously. The hundreds of imitators that followed inherited that infrastructure. None of them would have had a category to enter if Seedlip hadn't built it first.
Getting flexible: Pilates and Yoga
A different sector, same pattern. Some years ago a bad back sent me to a Pilates studio for the first time. What struck me, once I'd recovered enough to think about anything other than my spine, was that I'd entered a category that twenty years earlier would have been almost completely unfamiliar to me and was now mainstream enough that there were three studios within walking distance of my house. Pilates as a serious adult practice (as opposed to a niche of dance training and rehabilitation, which is how it existed for most of the twentieth century) was built by a small group of equipment manufacturers and studio chains who simultaneously trained instructors, sold reformer equipment, ran certification programmes and worked patiently to establish the practice as a legitimate adult fitness category. Most consumers experience Pilates today through infrastructure these companies built. The equipment companies: Balanced Body in the US, Stott Pilates (now Merrithew), Reformer manufacturers like Align Pilates in the UK, built the supply side. The studio chains built the demand side. The whole edifice required the patient training of thousands of instructors, almost none of whom existed as a professional class before the category-building work began.
Yoga, which I came to after Pilates, has a longer and more complicated history, but the modern adult Western yoga as commercial category story is similar in shape. Studios. Teacher training programmes. A particular aesthetic. A specific kind of community. Companies like Lululemon did significant category building work alongside the studios themselves, particularly in normalising the idea that yoga had its own apparel, its own visual language, its own consumer identity. The category felt taken-for-granted to me by the time I joined it. But it had to be built by someone before that was possible.
Cycling as culture and community
Another life enhancing and bank balance draining passion is cycling. And another category builder is Rapha. Cycling, of course, isn't new. But cycling as a consumer cultural identity, with cafés, clubs, branded events, content production and a particular aesthetic, was substantially built by Rapha after its founding in 2004. The company's distinctive move wasn't the apparel itself but the surrounding infrastructure: Clubhouses (physical retail-and-café spaces that doubled as ride meeting points), the Rapha Cycling Club (a membership organisation with rides, events, and content), and a sustained content programme that treated cycling as a serious cultural practice rather than a sport or commute. People who became cyclists in the years after Rapha's founding often did so within a culture that Rapha had been instrumental in shaping.
The interesting thing about Rapha is what happened after the category they built was established. The cultural ground they cultivated: cycling as adult identity, café and club culture, the aesthetic of considered cycling apparel, turned out to be fertile for a whole set of adjacent categories. Gravel cycling, almost unheard of as a discrete category fifteen years ago, is now a significant segment with its own brands, races, magazines, and bike geometries. Cycle touring has been substantially revived, partly by brands like Restrap, Apidura, and Carradice doing patient work to establish bikepacking as a category in its own right. Long-distance audax events have moved from niche pursuit to bucket list aspiration for a much wider population. None of these would have grown the way they have without the cultural ground that Rapha and its peers cultivated first. This is one of the under-noticed features of category building: a successful category often becomes the platform from which further categories emerge.
The elements of category creation
The pattern across these examples and across many less famous ones, is consistent. The category building work has several features in common.
It's education led. The consumer has to be brought along intellectually before they can be brought along commercially. This means content, training, public events, accessible writing, and patient explanation over years. The Hoffmann YouTube channel, the Lululemon yoga ambassadors, the Seedlip bartender training programmes. All variations of the same underlying activity.
It's built around infrastructure. Real world structures get created: venues, communities, certifications, partnerships with adjacent professionals, that make the category materially exist beyond marketing. The Prufrock café, the Rapha Clubhouse, the Pilates studio chain, the dedicated cocktail menu at a top London restaurant. Without infrastructure, awareness doesn't translate into behaviour.
It partners with non customers. Bartenders, baristas, instructors, practitioners, specialty retailers, journalists: people who have power over how the category is understood without necessarily being its end consumers. Building those relationships often matters more than direct consumer marketing in the early years.
It's patient with revenue. The commercial returns lag the category-building work by years, sometimes decades. Monmouth was roasting single-origin coffee in 1978, twenty-five years before the third wave became a recognisable cultural force in the UK. Businesses that try to extract commercial value before the category is established usually end up doing neither, they neither build the category nor capture the value of having built it.
It’s creative with revenue. Does the category building become a revenue stream? In many of these sectors practitioner education becomes a key element of the business model, if not as core revenue then certainly as a means of paid for market growth.
And it's generous, by structural necessity. The brand that builds a category necessarily creates the conditions for competitors to enter it. There is no way to do category building work that benefits only your brand. You're educating the market that your competitors will eventually sell into. Many businesses can't quite accept this and try to find ways to capture the category they're building, which usually slows the building or breaks it. The brands that do it well, Monmouth, Rapha, Seedlip, Hoffmann's whole YouTube enterprise, seem to operate from a position of genuine interest in the category mattering, more than in cornering the value it produces.
Building the future
The categories that come next will be built by people doing similar work, often in places most of us aren't yet paying attention to. A few worth watching: the genuinely adult non-alcoholic drinking culture (now beyond Seedlip into wine, beer, aperitifs, and entire adult social spaces). Longevity and biological age testing, currently being built by a combination of consumer brands and clinics. Adult literacy in microbiome health, which is moving from research science to consumer category in real time. Indoor plant culture, particularly among urban dwellers and which has gone from forlorn cactus on a shelf to a significant lifestyle category in about a decade. Outdoor swimming. Domestic fermentation. The slow but real rebuilding of community spaces (community fridges, repair cafés, makerspaces) as a recognisable category of civic participation rather than a niche of activism. Each of these is being built right now by people doing the patient, education led, infrastructure heavy work that’s needed.
For a business considering whether it's in one of these categories, or whether it could be building a new one, the diagnostic question is simple but uncomfortable. Could a customer credibly choose between us and our nearest competitor right now, and explain what they were choosing? If the honest answer is no, if the customer doesn't yet have a framework for the choice, doesn't understand what the category is, doesn't know what good looks like, then conventional brand strategy is the wrong tool. The work, before anything else, is to build the category.
This is some of the most rewarding strategic work I do, partly because it's so structurally underestimated. The businesses doing it well are often quietly building positions that competitors will find very hard to dislodge later, because they're building not just a brand but the cultural ground the brand stands on.
It's also, judging by twenty years of watching it happen in coffee, drinks, fitness, and cycling, the kind of work that benefits the people who do it in ways that go beyond the commercial. The people who built specialty coffee in the UK in the 1990s and 2000s seem, almost without exception, to be people who love coffee deeply. The people building non alcoholic drinks now genuinely care about what people drink in social settings. Hoffmann, for all his commercial success, is still very obviously a person who finds coffee endlessly interesting. The patient, generous, infrastructure led work of category building doesn't seem to attract people primarily motivated by short-term commercial return. Which is probably why the people who do it tend to build categories that last.
If you're sitting inside a business that might be in this position, or building toward it, the question is worth taking seriously. The most successful categories of the next decade are being built now, often by people who care more about the craft than the commerce. Whether you'd want to be one of those people is the first question. Whether your business has the patience for the kind of work this requires is the second.