The past is not a fallback.
Category creation is slow and repetitive, so at some point it gets tempting to go back to what used to work. The catch is that the market those tactics worked in is gone too.
- Category creation is repetitive by design: the same argument, made until the market repeats it back.
- The quiet stretch is where teams get talked into doubling back to tactics that used to work.
- The tactics still exist. The conditions that made them work — the budget line, the attention, the buyer who already understood the problem — mostly do not.
- Repetition is not a sign the message is failing. Adoption is repetition: you say it until other people say it.
- Change course on evidence about the market, not on discomfort about the pace.
Creating a category is mostly repetition. You say the same sentence in a pitch, on a panel, in a briefing, on a website, to an analyst, and then you say it again the following month to people who have never heard it. For a long stretch, that is the entire gig.
Progress is real in this stretch; but it registers somewhere other than a hockey stick chart. What you take to the board is incremental rather than dramatic — and once you know which signals to point at, incremental evidence is the more trustworthy read.
The pull backward
Somewhere around month 6 to 9, the pull starts. Pipeline has not turned yet, the message is still being absorbed, and someone senior asks a fair question: why don't we go back to what worked before?
What follows is usually a specific proposal. Run the competitive comparison again. Put the webinar behind a form. Go back to the analyst category that had a budget line. Lead with the feature list, because at least people knew what to do with that.
It sounds like discipline rather than retreat, and that is what makes it hard to argue with. The old plays have receipts. Someone in the room watched them work.
Retreating to the old playbook is not the safer bet. It is a bet on a market that no longer exists.
The past is not there to go back to
A tactic worked because of what surrounded it: a buyer who already understood the problem, a category with a line in someone's budget, a channel that had not yet been saturated, a level of attention that no longer exists.
Take those away and running the same play produces a different result. The webinar that filled a room now competes with a hundred others. The comparison grid that closed deals assumed a buyer already shopping in a defined category, which is precisely what you do not have when you are creating one.
So retreating is not a return to safety. It is a fresh bet on a market that has moved on — and because it looks like caution, nobody treats it as a bet at all.
Repetition is the work
Category creation feels boring in the middle because adoption is repetition. A category exists when other people use its language without you in the room, and that only happens after they have heard it enough times to use it confidently. It is not fast, and it is not meant to be — which is why it is worth measuring properly rather than abandoning.
Which means the flat stretch needs different instruments. Pipeline is a lagging measure here, and read monthly it will always argue for retreat. What you can watch instead:
- Buyers repeating your framing back to you in calls, in their own words, without prompting.
- The problem showing up in job descriptions, board decks, and RFPs before your product does.
- Analysts and press using your phrasing as a description rather than a claim.
- Competitors starting to position against your framing, which means they have accepted the frame.
Those move months before revenue does, and they are the difference between a message that is slow and a message that is wrong. For the longer version, watch for the moment the name gets adopted and how an analyst picking it up changes the conversation.
What to do in the quiet stretch
Not nothing, and not something new. The useful moves are unglamorous:
- Say it again, to a different room. Most of your market has not heard it once, let alone enough times.
- Tighten the sentence. Repetition surfaces the words that are not working; fix those rather than replacing the argument.
- Ship proof, not variety. One customer story that demonstrates the claim beats 6 new assets restating it.
- Relaunch on purpose. The same thing can be launched more than once.
The last one deserves a note, because teams treat a launch as a single event with one chance. It rarely is: launching the same thing again is normal practice.
What actually justifies changing course
None of this means never change direction. It means changing it for a reason that comes from the market rather than from the calendar. Worth acting on:
- Buyers consistently reframe the problem into something you are not solving.
- The people who say yes are all buying it for a reason other than the one you lead with.
- The category you are naming turns out to sit inside a bigger one the buyer already has a budget for.
- You have run the argument through enough rooms to know it is not a delivery problem.
Those are findings. Flat pipeline in month 7 is not a finding, it is a stage, and telling them apart is a lot that goes into growth expertise. If you are trying to work out which one you have, the honest test is whether you can point at evidence before spending against it.
Category creation asks you to keep making an argument long after it stops feeling new, on the evidence that other people are starting to repeat it. The pull backward is real. The place it leads is not there anymore, and the work is to keep repeating the name until it stops being yours.
Part of our work on category creation in security.