Markets Grow Up. Does Your Messaging?

Early in my career, I worked with a company building an electronic medical record system.

This was before EMRs existed. Before hospitals and physician groups had any concept of what one was, let alone why they'd want one.

Our job wasn't to explain why our EMR was better than the competition's. There was no competition. Our job was to convince healthcare organizations that digitizing patient records had value at all.

That's category creation. And if you've ever been a first mover in a new product category, you know the playbook. You're not selling your product. You're selling the idea that this new thing matters.

The upside of being first

Being first into a category has real advantages. You get to define the terms. You get to shape how the market thinks about the problem. You get the lion's share of attention because, for a while, you're the only game in town.

But being first also means doing something harder than selling a product. It means educating the market about a new category that didn't exist in their minds before. The target market doesn't know what they don't know yet. Your messaging has to do double duty — establish that a problem is worth solving, and then position your solution as the way to solve it.

For us, that meant our marketing wasn't about features or differentiators. It was about value. Why does an electronic record matter? What does it change? What does it make possible that paper charts never could?

Then the market grows up

Here's the part that trips people up. Markets mature. They get educated — partly by you, partly by competitors who show up once they see you've proven the category works, partly just by time.

Once that happens, you no longer need to convince anyone that the category matters. Everybody already knows. The buyer isn't asking "why would I want an EMR?" anymore. They're asking "why yours instead of theirs?"

That's a completely different question. And it demands a completely different answer.

The message has to shift from category value to competitive differentiation. Not because your old message was wrong. It was exactly right — for that moment. It's wrong now because the market moved and the message didn't.

It doesn't happen on a calendar

If this shift happened on a specific date, it would be easy. It doesn't.

Markets mature unevenly. Some segments get educated fast. Others lag for years. So for a stretch of time — sometimes a long stretch — you're running both messages at once. Part of your market still needs the value pitch. Part of it has already moved on and wants to know what makes you different.

That overlap is normal. What's not normal, and what I've watched sink otherwise smart companies more than once, is never noticing the shift at all.

Where companies get stuck

Here's the pattern I've seen play out again and again. A company nails the category-creation message. It works. Revenue grows. The team gets confident, and understandably so — they built something that worked.

Then the market matures around them, and they keep running the same play. Same pitch. Same deck. Same talking points that used to land because there was no competition to compare against.

Except now there is competition. And the buyer already knows the category has value — they've heard it from you, from your competitors, from their own peers. Repeating the value message starts to sound like you're stating the obvious. Worse, it starts to sound like you don't have anything sharper to say about why you're the right choice.

Companies get stuck because the old message worked. That's the trap. Success in one phase of a market breeds the exact instincts that will hurt you in the next one.

What this actually requires

None of this is a novel insight. Ask any experienced marketer and they'll nod along. The harder part isn't understanding this in the abstract. It's building the discipline to actually watch your market and catch the shift while it's happening — not two years after your competitors already have.

That means talking to buyers regularly, not just closed-won customers but the ones who walked away. It means watching what questions show up in sales calls. If prospects have stopped asking "why should we care about this" and started asking "how are you different from X," that's your signal. The market told you. The question is whether you were listening.

I've run marketing at companies through exactly this transition, more than once. It's uncomfortable, because it usually means retiring language and positioning that took real work to build in the first place. But holding onto a message because it used to work is how category leaders get overtaken by companies with a sharper, more current story.

Markets evolve. Your message has to evolve with them. How you sold yesterday isn't how you'll sell tomorrow — and the companies that figure that out first are the ones still standing when the category matures for good.