# Choosing Your Category: the Highest-Leverage Positioning Decision

Positioning isn't the tagline — it's the mental filing cabinet you ask buyers to put you in. The category choice silently sets your competitors, your price anchor, your must-have features, and who evaluates you. Most positioning docs skip it; it's the whole game.

## Your three options, always

1. **Enter an existing category** ("we're a CRM") — instant comprehension, inherited buying process and budget line, but you inherit the feature checklist and the incumbent's shadow. Right when: the category leader under-serves a segment you can own.
2. **Sub-niche a category** ("the CRM for law firms") — comprehension + differentiation, smaller-but-owned demand. Right when: a segment's workflow genuinely diverges from the mainstream product's assumptions. This is the default best answer for most products.
3. **Create a category** ("we're not X, we're the first Y") — no checklist, no anchor, total narrative control — and total education cost. Requires: years of runway, content muscle, and a real discontinuity (new behaviour, not new packaging). Most "new categories" are option-2 products with expensive branding.

## The decision inputs

- **What budget line does the money come from today?** Position where the budget already exists unless you can afford to create one.
- **What do buyers type when the pain hits?** Search/AI-assistant queries are category votes. If they ask for "CRM for firms", option 2 is chosen for you.
- **Who wins a bake-off in the incumbent category?** If a checklist eval kills you, don't enter that category — reframe to an eval you win.

## Anchor mechanics

The category sets the price anchor: "a CRM" anchors to Salesforce's per-seat; "a revenue intelligence layer" floats free (and must justify itself alone). Pick the anchor you can beat or escape — never one that halves your price by association.

## Commitment test

The doc's category claim must survive: the homepage H1, the sales deck's slide 2, the analyst call, and the pricing page — all saying the *same* filing cabinet. Four surfaces, four different categories = no positioning, just words.
