A founder explains why naming your category matters in B2B. He chose cloud BI over business intelligence to avoid direct competition with established players, letting his company own a smaller, newer space.
How do you come up with the name for the category? Business intelligence had been around at the time for 30 plus years and was a pretty saturated market. You know MicroStrategy, ClickView, Tableau, all these companies that were already in business intelligence and so we could have looker could have just gone and said we're yet another business intelligence company but then we would have invited comparison to all of the other BI companies that were already around it that would have been detrimental to us. We wouldn't have been able to tell the right story. And so instead of we said we're not just a BI company we are a cloud BI company and that I think is really important and maybe you call that positioning. Some people call it category design. I don't care what you call it. I just really do think it's important that you have a really crystallized vision of how you're different and the banner that you're under is communicating that difference pretty clearly.