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Imagine this…
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It’s 9:47 p.m. on a Thursday, and you’re staring blankly at your marketing dashboard.
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The numbers are brutal.
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Your website traffic? Down 29% from six months ago.
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Your ads? You’re barely breaking even.
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And your sales team? They’re having longer conversations but fewer closes.
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The reliable tactics that built your business over the past decade feel like they just stopped working.
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And with AI changing the landscape every day, it feels impossible to keep up.
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Feeling defeated, you click over to LinkedIn to doomscroll when you see a big-name marketer talking about the “growth playbook for the AI era.”
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It’s called “Loop Marketing,” created by HubSpot, the industry leader that pioneered “inbound marketing”.
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Your scrolling stops in its tracks.
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Everyone in the comments seems really excited about this new concept.
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You’re instantly intrigued and want to know more.
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​Why are you suddenly curious to learn more about Loop Marketing?​
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In today’s edition of Why We Buy 🧠 we’ll explore Category Creation—why we pay attention to brands that name and claim a new category.
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​Let’s get into it.

🧠 The Psychology of Category Creation

When you see a product, your brain immediately asks: “What is this?” Then it assigns a label to make sense of it.
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Why? Because our brains la-la-love taking mental shortcuts to save energy and time.
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And if you want to differentiate your product in a crowded market, creating a new category you can truly own can (sometimes) be a smart move.
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For example, did you know HubSpot created “inbound marketing”? Before HubSpot named and claimed it, inbound marketing wasn’t a “thing.”
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Whoever helps your brain create that first label often owns it forever—the first frame becomes the reference point for everything else in the category.

New categories spark an information gap that people want to close, so they pay attention to it.
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Better yet? New stuff is novel and gets people talking. And when they mention the category, you’re seen as the leader.
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If you can create a new category that buyers understand and get excited about, you can short-circuit their decision-making.
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​You’re no longer a choice. You’re the default choice in that category.

🤑 How To Apply This

Alright, so how can you apply this right now to sell more?
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Strategy​
Sell a movement, not just the product

In a time when cold calling, spam emails, and pushy ads reigned supreme (aka 2006), HubSpot had a different approach: provide valuable content so buyers find you.
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​And so they created the category of “inbound marketing” and flooded the market with blogs, ebooks, and certifications that taught the world why inbound mattered.

Suddenly, using HubSpot didn’t just mean buying marketing software. You were joining the enlightened marketers who “get it.” Those who attract rather than annoy and help rather than harass.
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Using HubSpot meant you weren’t a pushy marketer. Instead, you were one of the smart ones.

Messaging​
Turn a bug into a feature

Let’s be honest: staying in a stranger’s house should feel weird and creepy.
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But Airbnb didn’t try to hide this awkwardness. Instead, they made that intimacy the point, positioning themselves within the emerging “sharing economy” as the way to truly experience a destination.
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Their “Belong Anywhere” campaign transformed what could have been seen as invasive into something authentic. Suddenly, hotels felt cold and impersonal by comparison.

By embracing what made them different, Airbnb helped travellers crave the authentic local experience that only staying in someone’s home could provide.

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Ads​
Name an annoying problem—and show how your product solves it

Sometimes creating a new category isn’t the right move. Instead, you can position your product in an existing category while naming and claiming a specific problem buyers understand.
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Before Snickers’ “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” campaign, being cranky when hungry was just an unfortunate part of life that no one paid attention to.
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Then Snickers gave us a word to describe the problem: being “hangry.”

Suddenly, Snickers owned the solution to a problem they’d just popularized. And when someone got hangry, they thought of Snickers.

💥 The Short of It

Category creation isn’t just about building better products.
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It’s about building associations and new ways of thinking.
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When you define the category, you get to set the rules everyone else has to play by.
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And not much in marketing is more thrilling than that.
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​​Until next time, happy selling!