Bing Crosby and Category Ownership

With Alexa and Spotify this year, I listened to plenty of holiday music this year. My favorite tunes are Lennon’s War is Over and Bing Crosby’s Mele Kalikimaka. What I noticed when listening to the constant mix of Holiday songs is how many of the classics are sung by Bing Crosby.

While many singers have hit holiday songs, what is unique about Bing is that the holiday songs have defined his brand. Ever since he debuted in the movie “White Christmas”, Bing Crosby’s name has been almost synonymous with Christmas music. This category ownership is important in business where companies can endure heavy disruption & can even react slowly to new entrants if they own a category.

A few examples come to mind

Uber & Ride Sharing — While Uber has had several large culture scandals & mishaps, they continue to dominate & own this large category despite relentless new entrants & fierce competition

GoPro — Action cameras are made by many companies now but it’s tough to gain market share when people refer action cameras as “GoPros”

Fitbit — While the smartwatch market is where activity trackers are moving, Fitbit still completely dominates the activity tracker market and similar to GoPro, left no room for entrants to compete — Even when Xiaomi had a similar offering a 1/10 the price!

How to achieve this is often described as business black magic but I really enjoyed the book Play Bigger and think they did the best job of describing a process for category creation & ownership without the black magic.