What Is the Law of Category in Marketing?

The law of category is simple: if you cannot be first in an existing category, create a new category where you can be first. In modern content marketing this means giving a name to an unnamed problem, then owning the language around it before competitors arrive.

What Is the Law of Category?

The law of category says that if you cannot be first in an established category, you should create a new category where you can be first. It is the second of the 22 immutable laws of marketing that Al Ries and Jack Trout published in their 1993 book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

The book opens with a memorable question: who was the third person to fly solo across the Atlantic? Almost nobody knows. But nearly everyone knows Amelia Earhart, because she was the first woman to do it. She did not beat the record holders. She changed the dimension of comparison and became first in a category of one.

The beer market shows the same logic in commercial form. Instead of launching another import to fight Heineken, Anheuser-Busch created a premium-priced domestic beer with Michelob, then the first domestic light beer with Miller Lite. Each move invented a subcategory rather than attacking an occupied one. As a marketing strategy, the lesson is direct: leadership inside a category you defined is easier to hold than second place in one you did not.

Why Being Compared to Competitors Costs You Money

If customers constantly compare you to a competitor, the comparison usually ends in a price negotiation. A market where products look interchangeable is a commodity market, and commodity markets reward the cheapest option.

The escape is to change what the buyer is comparing. When you sell a diagnosis instead of a generic product, the buyer evaluates you against the problem you named, not against a list of substitutes. The video behind this article calls the modern version of the law of category exactly this: who creates the language controls the perception.

That reframing has a practical test. If your audience can describe your offer using a phrase nobody else uses, search traffic, word of mouth and authority all route through you. If they describe it with the industry's generic term, you are one of ten thousand tabs.

Three Things That Happen When You Name a Problem

When a real but unnamed problem gets a name, three things happen at once, and all three favor whoever coined the term.

1. Search demand is created from zero. Before the phrase existed, nobody typed it into Google or TikTok. After it spreads, every search is someone self-diagnosing with your term and looking for your solution.
2. You become the authority of the term instantly. Platforms rank early content on a new phrase first, and every later creator using your term is feeding traffic to your keyword.
3. Competition is removed structurally. A rival cannot easily rank for a phrase you invented eight months ago, with an established body of content and a direct relationship with everyone who discovered the term through you.

None of this requires spending more or posting more. It requires being the person who supplied the language a market now uses to describe its own discomfort.

Named Problems That Created Real Markets

The clearest examples come from health and wellness content, where a two-word phrase with a clinical ring can launch an entire product category. The figures below are reported by the analyzed video and should be read as its claims, not as clinical findings.

Term	What it names	Reported market effect
Cortisol belly	Stress-related abdominal weight gain	~$100M in supplement sales over 2 years (video's estimate)
Leaky gut	A cluster of digestive symptoms, not a formal diagnosis	Multi-billion-dollar global supplement revenue (video's claim)
Tech neck	Neck strain from device posture	Multi-million-dollar Shopify stores selling posture correctors
Ozempic face	Facial volume loss after GLP-1 use	Fast-growing restorative skincare and collagen categories

The critical caveat: none of these is a formal medical diagnosis. As the video stresses, cortisol belly appears in no medical textbook, has no clinical criteria and no peer-reviewed research validating it as a distinct condition. Marketers took a real, felt symptom, gave it a plausible-sounding clinical name, and built a category on the gap between the experience and the vocabulary.

The same mechanism names GLP-1 medications themselves, such as Ozempic, Novo Nordisk's semaglutide injection: viral beauty terms like Ozempic face spread because thousands of patients shared an experience that had no existing label.

How Businesses Applied Category Creation Beyond Supplements

Category naming is not limited to TikTok wellness sellers. Some of the strongest software marketing companies were built the same way, from the label inward.

• HubSpot coined inbound marketing before perfecting its product, then sold software to an audience it had already taught to believe in the concept; the video cites the term's association with a company eventually valued in the tens of billions. See HubSpot's own inbound marketing definition.
• Sean Ellis coined growth hacking in a 2010 blog post and built an entire industry and career from a two-word phrase invented in an afternoon.
• Ramit Sethi, personal finance author and founder of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, named tactical hell: the state of chasing every new channel (SEO, ads, giveaways, podcasts) instead of committing to a few strategic moves. Once named, the feeling becomes a problem the audience knows it has.
• Venture capital gave us unicorn for billion-dollar startups in 2013, when Aileen Lee's term appeared in a TechCrunch essay, a label that now organizes an entire investment narrative.

How to Create Your Own Category Term

Creating a category term follows a repeatable procedure. Copywriting manuals call it a unique mechanism, and the problem-naming variant works in five steps.

1. Find a real, felt problem without a name. Your audience can describe the feeling but not the cause. Listen to how they struggle for words.
2. Verify no clinical or industry label already owns it. If a term exists and a competitor owns it, inventing a synonym for their keyword helps nobody.
3. Craft a two-word phrase that sounds technical but is instantly graspable, the way growth hacking repurposed a word from computing, or inbound marketing wrapped SEO and content under one label.
4. Publish the diagnostic first. Lead with 'you probably have X' before prescribing the cure, so every search for the phrase finds your explanation.
5. Build products into the category. The term creates the shelf; the solution, whether supplements, ergonomic chairs or training, is what sells from it.

The same pattern fits any industry. An ergonomics brand could name the metabolic cost of ten-hour desk days. A car maker could name a discomfort specific to long drives and position the vehicle as the cure. A creator who names creator burnout or algorithm anxiety for a niche audience can become the reference for it.

Limitations and Ethical Boundaries of Category Creation

The law of category is powerful precisely because it works on perception, which is also its risk. Naming a fake clinical condition to sell supplements can mislead buyers about their health, and the video itself flags that its source material reads like AI-assisted direct-response copy, produced with tools like ChatGPT, OpenAI's assistant.

Honest applications share two traits. First, the underlying problem is real; only the name is new, as with stress-related weight gain or posture pain. Second, the term clarifies rather than fabricates: technical debt and scope creep in software engineering help teams discuss genuine problems, not invent diseases.

Treat category creation as a positioning tool, not a substitute for a working product. A named problem attracts attention once; only a real solution justifies the audience's trust a second time.

FAQ

• Who wrote the law of category? Al Ries and Jack Trout codified it as law number two in The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, first published in 1993. The book states that if you cannot be first in a category, set up a new category where you can be first.

• Is cortisol belly a real medical condition? No. As the analyzed video emphasizes, it has no entry in medical textbooks, no diagnostic criteria and no peer-reviewed validation. It is a marketing name for stress-related abdominal weight gain, a real symptom without a formal clinical label.

• What is an example of the law of category outside marketing? Amelia Earhart is the book's own example: she became famous as the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo rather than the third person to do it, changing the comparison's dimension.

• Can small creators use the law of category? Yes. The mechanism favors early movers on a new phrase, not big budgets. A solo creator who names a niche problem before anyone else ranks first for it by default on TikTok, YouTube and Google.

• What is the difference between a problem mechanism and a solution mechanism? A problem mechanism names and diagnoses the audience's condition, like cortisol belly. A solution mechanism names the proprietary way your product fixes it. The strategy in this article is the problem mechanism.

Turn Your Own Explainers Into a Written Category Playbook

This article started as a video analysis, because the fastest way to teach a positioning idea is usually to talk through it, and the fastest way to make it searchable is to write it down. That gap between spoken insight and published, retrievable text is exactly the problem Skala Blog solves.

If you explain strategies like these in your videos, whether they belong to a course such as the Bootcamp do Dev Doido, a program like Crazystack Typescript from the team at crazystack.com.br, or content by creators such as Gustavo Dev Doido, you already own knowledge that deserves its own named corner of the internet. Visit Skala Blog, paste a YouTube URL, and turn the transcription into a structured article.

Naming a problem makes it findable. Naming your own content works the same way, and Skala Blog handles the video-to-article step so the ideas stop living only inside a 17-minute video.

Source video