How to
Win Your
Category

Build Category Authority Through Strategic Communications

Something has broken in how leaders build credibility.

For decades, the path was clear: do great work, get noticed by the right publication, let the coverage speak for itself. Newsrooms had beat reporters who covered your industry. Trade publications had editors who knew the players. If you were good enough for long enough, the system would eventually find you.

That system is gone.

Newsrooms in the US have contracted by over 40% in the last fifteen years. The journalists who remain are covering more beats with less time. Press releases increasingly feed AI models, not reporters. Editorial decisions are driven by algorithm as much as expertise. And the institutions that once conferred authority on leaders — through bylines, awards, and earned endorsements — can no longer do so reliably or at scale.

What remains is a structural vacuum. And it's being filled — not by the most qualified voices, but by the most persistent ones.

The new media landscape has revealed an uncomfortable truth: obsession combined with distribution is beating expertise. People with novice experience but the drive to explore and report publicly — at a rate seasoned experts simply can't match while doing their actual work — are claiming the conversations that belong to the people who've been in the room for decades.

The answer isn't to match their volume. Visibility alone is noise, but strategic communications is intention in motion.

One podcast appearance on the right show can do more for your credibility than a profile in a national newspaper. One byline in your industry's leading trade publication can reshape how decision-makers perceive you faster than a year of social media posting. The intentional, consistent players win this game — not the loudest ones.

This article is about how to become one of those players. It's a strategic communications framework for building what we call category authority — the kind of positioning that makes you the voice your industry turns to when the topic you care about comes up. Not because you out-posted everyone, but because you built the infrastructure that makes your perspective impossible to ignore.

It draws on established strategy from positioning theory, category design, public narrative, and a decade of earned media work with executives, founders, and institutional leaders. We're publishing it open-source because we believe the model should be accessible. The execution is where the real value lives.

If you read this and feel like a light came on — that's the goal.

Who This Is For (And Who It Isn't)

Before we go further, let's be honest about fit.

This framework is for leaders who have real expertise and a track record but whose public visibility doesn't match their actual authority. You've been doing the work — running the organization, building the product, serving the community, closing the deals — but when your industry's biggest conversations happen in public, your name isn't in the room.

You might recognize yourself in one of these patterns:

You had a big media moment, and then went quiet. A feature in a national outlet, a viral post, a keynote that landed. But there was no system to sustain the momentum, and within weeks you were back to invisible. The coverage didn't compound because nothing came after it.

You have all the raw materials but no connective strategy. A book, speaking engagements, a podcast, paid events, strong credentials. But each asset operates independently. The book doesn't drive the speaking. The speaking doesn't drive the media. Nothing builds on anything else.

You're celebrated in your community but cautious in public. People who know you trust your expertise. But every public statement feels high-stakes — especially when you're accountable to diverse stakeholders — so you default to silence during the moments that matter most. You're respected, but you're not shaping the conversation.

You're visible on social media but invisible in earned media. Strong LinkedIn presence, good engagement, consistent posting. But no journalist is calling you for expert comment. No conference organizer is building a panel around your perspective. Social proof hasn't translated to category authority.

If any of that resonates, keep reading. This is for you.

And if you're early in your career or pre-traction? This framework is still valuable — perhaps more valuable to you than to anyone else. You can start building category authority before you have a track record by engaging with the ecosystem first.

Someone with zero published credentials who spends three months engaging thoughtfully with their category's existing conversation — contributing perspective on peer content, building relationships with journalists who cover the space, showing up consistently where the conversation is happening — will be better positioned than someone with twenty years of experience who has never participated publicly.

Deep time in a space means nothing if there's no recorded evidence of credibility. Start building that evidence now, even before you have the resume to back it up. The section on ecosystem engagement below is your entry point.

What Category Authority Actually Is

Let's define terms, because the language around "thought leadership" and "personal branding" has become so diluted that it's almost meaningless.

Category has a specific meaning in marketing strategy. Al Ries and Jack Trout established in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind that categories are mental containers — the way people organize who solves what problem. Volvo owns "safety." FedEx owns "overnight." The most powerful positioning strategy is owning a word in the prospect's mind.

The Play Bigger framework (Ramadan, Peterson, Lochhead, Maney) extended this into category design — the deliberate creation of new market categories. Their research shows that "category kings" capture 76% of their market's total value. The formula: define a problem the market doesn't yet know it has, build a point of view around it, construct the ecosystem.

Both frameworks are built for companies and products. But the underlying principle applies to leaders: your category is the specific problem you address, seen through your distinct perspective, for a defined audience.

It's not your industry. Your industry is where you work. Philanthropy, technology, healthcare, cannabis, real estate — these are sectors with thousands of voices. You can't own a sector.

Your category is narrower: the specific intersection of problem, perspective, and audience where your expertise creates a defensible position. It's where you have conviction that others lack, experience that others can't replicate, and a point of view that — if the right people heard it — would change how they think about the problem.

Three Levels of Category Strategy

Not every leader is playing the same game, and confusing the levels leads to wasted strategy.

Category creation is defining a new problem space that didn't previously exist. Salesforce didn't compete in enterprise software — they created "cloud CRM" and made on-premise software feel obsolete. HubSpot didn't compete in marketing services — they created "inbound marketing" and redefined how companies attract customers. Category creation requires building a market from scratch. It's a multi-year, resource-intensive strategy that most individual leaders don't need and shouldn't attempt.

Category leadership is becoming the dominant player in an existing category. This is a market share play — being the #1 that captures the majority of the economics. Think of it as winning a race that already has defined lanes and competitors.

Category authority is becoming the recognized expert whose perspective shapes how a category evolves. You're not trying to capture market share. You're trying to become the voice that the market turns to — the person journalists call, conference organizers build panels around, and peers reference when they're making sense of what's changing.

Most leaders reading this are currently building category authority, even if inconsistently. Doing this informs whether you’re fit to create a new market and validates your enterprise ability to dominate market share. Your immediate need now is to ensure that when the conversation about your area of expertise happens in rooms that matter, your perspective is present and influential — whether you're physically in the room or not.

How to Define Your Category

Your category lives at the intersection of three things you already know: your industry, your specialty within it, and the scope of your authority.

Industry is where you work. Venture capital, healthcare, cannabis, philanthropy, SaaS, environmental services. This is the broadest container — too broad to own, but it tells you which publications cover your space, which conferences matter, and which peer set you're operating in.

Specialty is what you actually do within that industry — the specific discipline, methodology, or focus area where your expertise runs deepest. Not "venture capital" but "climate-focused venture capital." Not "healthcare" but "rural health system design." Not "cannabis" but "cannabis regulatory strategy." Not "SaaS" but "founder-led product development."

Scope is the geographic, demographic, or market boundary that sharpens your position further. National, regional, sector-specific, audience-specific. A climate-focused VC operating globally is positioning differently than one focused on the American Southeast. A health system designer focused on rural communities is in a different conversation than one focused on urban academic medical centers.

When you combine all three, you get a category you can name, research, and defend:

Industry: Venture Capital. Specialty: Climate tech. Scope: North American early-stage. Category: Early-stage climate venture capital.
Industry: Cannabis. Specialty: Regulatory strategy. Scope: Multi-state operators. Category: Cannabis regulatory strategy.
Industry: SaaS. Specialty: Founder-led growth. Scope: Bootstrapped companies. Category: Bootstrapped founder-led SaaS.
Industry: Philanthropy. Specialty: Community-led grantmaking. Scope: U.S. community foundations. Category: Community-led philanthropy.

Why Defining Your Category Matters

This isn't an academic exercise. Your category definition determines every downstream decision in your authority strategy:

It tells you which publications matter. Early-stage climate venture capital has a different media landscape than general VC. You're reading and pitching Climate Tech VC, GreenBiz, Axios Climate — not just TechCrunch. You know which journalists cover your beat because your beat is defined.

It tells you who your peers are. Once you can name your category, you can search for who else is publishing, speaking, and being quoted in that space. These aren't competitors to fear — they're the landscape to study. What are they saying? Where are they showing up? What perspectives are missing? Where is the gap your voice fills?

It tells you which awards and stages matter. Every industry has awards that signal credibility and conferences that confer authority. Your category narrows the list from overwhelming to obvious. A cannabis regulatory strategist doesn't need to be on generic "women in business" lists — she needs to be on Cannabis Law Report's most influential attorneys list and speaking at the National Cannabis Industry Association's policy summit.

It gives you something to measure. Share of voice — how often you're quoted, cited, or featured relative to others in your category — is only measurable if the category is defined. "Am I visible in SaaS?" is unanswerable. "Am I visible in bootstrapped founder-led SaaS?" is researchable, trackable, and actionable.

If your category definition produces something too broad to research or too vague to find competitors in, it's not defined yet. Keep narrowing until the Google search for your category produces a recognizable set of voices — and you can see exactly where your perspective fits among them.

A note on category creation: Some leaders genuinely are creating new categories — defining a problem space that the market hasn't named yet. HubSpot created "inbound marketing." Salesforce created "cloud CRM." If that's you, recognize that the strategy is different: you'll spend significant time educating the market that the problem exists before you can position yourself as the authority on it. You're not just building authority — you're building the category itself, which requires proving it's real. The Play Bigger framework is your primary reference. But the principles in this article still apply — particularly around audience, context, and channel strategy. You just have an additional job on top of everything else: making the world see a problem it hasn't named yet.

Context Before Content

Here's where most authority-building advice fails: it jumps straight to "what should I post?" without asking "what moment am I operating in?"

Context is the single most important variable in communications strategy, and it's the one that templates and frameworks can't account for. Two leaders in the same industry, same geography, same media landscape can need completely different strategies depending on their context.

Consider: a climate-focused VC whose portfolio companies are navigating a sudden regulatory rollback on clean energy tax credits. Every public statement carries weight — investors are watching, portfolio founders are anxious, and the media is looking for voices to frame what the rollback means for the sector. The wrong framing could signal panic to LPs or provoke regulatory attention. The right framing — measured, operationally grounded, focused on portfolio resilience — could establish her as the voice the industry turns to when climate policy shifts threaten the market.

Now consider: a health tech founder in the same week announcing a Series B. The funding news is legitimately significant, but the broader economic environment is uncertain and the news cycle is dominated by policy anxiety. Her announcement strategy has to account for the fact that celebratory news during market stress can feel disconnected — but delaying indefinitely means losing the momentum that a funding announcement creates. The context demands a different approach: lead with what the company is building to solve a real problem, frame the funding as validation of the market need, and read the room on timing and tone.

Same week. Same general anxiety in the market. Completely different strategic needs.

This is why templates are dangerous. A "how to write a thought leadership post" template doesn't know that your market is in turmoil. A "media pitch framework" doesn't know that the journalist you're pitching just wrote a piece about layoffs in your sector and your celebratory press release will land wrong. Context is the thing that separates strategic communications from content production.

Reading Your Context

Before creating any content or pursuing any media opportunity, ask:

What moment is your industry in? Is it stable, disrupted, in crisis, consolidating, innovating? The moment determines what kind of voice is needed. In stability, contrarian perspectives that challenge complacency land well. In crisis, steady leadership and operational clarity matter more than provocation. In disruption, the voice that makes sense of the chaos earns authority fastest.
What moment is your audience in? Your industry might be stable while your specific audience is in turmoil — or vice versa. A calm industry with panicking buyers needs reassurance and clarity. A disrupted industry with savvy observers needs bold positioning. Match your communication to the audience's emotional and strategic state, not just the industry's.
What has already been said? Before you add your voice, understand the existing conversation. What positions have been taken? What's been covered? Where is the conversation stuck, incomplete, or heading in a direction you think is wrong? The worst thing you can do is publish something that's already been said better by someone else. The best thing you can do is say the thing everyone is thinking but nobody has articulated yet.
What hasn't been said that you're uniquely positioned to say? This is the opening. The gap between what's been covered and what needs to be heard — filtered through your specific experience and credibility — is where your voice creates the most value. If you can't identify that gap, either the conversation is complete (unlikely) or you haven't spent enough time in it yet.

Context changes. Your strategy should change with it. The leaders who build lasting authority are the ones who read the room accurately and adjust — not the ones who follow a content calendar regardless of what's happening around them.

Audience First, Always

This is the fundamental rule of media strategy, and it's the one that gets violated most often: know who you're trying to reach before you decide what to say or where to say it.

Most leaders think about audience backwards. They start with the platform ("I should post more on LinkedIn"), then the content ("what should I write about?"), then — maybe — they think about who's reading it. This produces content that gets engagement but doesn't build authority, because engagement without audience specificity is vanity.

Authority compounds when the right people encounter your perspective repeatedly — not when the most people see it once.

Two Audiences, Two Strategies

Your authority-building work will typically serve two distinct audiences, and they require different approaches:

The industry audience. These are the peers, journalists, conference organizers, policymakers, and institutional players whose recognition of your expertise shapes your category position. Reaching them builds your reputation within the industry — it's what gets you invited to keynote, quoted in trade press, cited by peers, and consulted on policy. The content that reaches this audience tends to be more analytical, more challenging to prevailing assumptions, and more focused on where the industry is heading. The channels are trade publications, industry conferences, peer networks, and professional platforms.

The buyer audience. These are the clients, customers, partners, or stakeholders whose decisions are directly influenced by your expertise. Reaching them builds your business — it's what fills your pipeline, drives inbound, and makes people say "I see you everywhere" before the first meeting. The content that reaches this audience tends to be more demonstrative, more focused on practical application, and more oriented around the problems they're actively trying to solve. The channels are wherever your buyers actually look when they're making decisions — which varies wildly by industry.

Most leaders need both, but not at the same time and not with the same content. A byline in your industry's leading trade publication builds category authority with peers but your buyers might never read it. A LinkedIn post demonstrating how you solved a specific client problem builds trust with buyers but might not impress the conference organizer who's looking for big-picture thinkers.

The strategic question is: which audience do you need to reach first to unlock the most value? For some leaders, industry recognition comes first — it creates the credibility that buyers respond to. For others, buyer traction comes first — it creates the proof that the industry can't ignore. There's no universal answer. But there is a universal mistake: trying to reach both with the same content on the same platforms at the same time.

And here's what's worth knowing: the leaders who build the deepest authority often start by serving their buyer audience so well that the industry has to take notice. When you are so present with the people you serve — iterating with them, solving their problems publicly, celebrating their wins, building and announcing in the open — you earn the right to shape the industry conversation because you've demonstrated that you understand it better than anyone else.

How Earned, Shared, and Owned Channels Work Together

Most communications advice treats channels as a menu: "be on LinkedIn, start a newsletter, get press coverage." But channels aren't independent options. They're an interconnected system, and the way they work together is what determines whether your authority compounds or evaporates.

Earned media is what others say about you. Press coverage, third-party features, podcast appearances as a guest, awards, expert citations. Earned media is the validator — it tells your audience that someone with editorial judgment looked at the landscape and decided your perspective was worth amplifying. This is why earned media is the cornerstone of category authority: it's the channel you don't control, which makes it the channel your audience trusts most. It's also increasingly important for search visibility — both traditional SEO and the emerging AI-driven search (GEO) that determines which experts surface when people ask questions about your category.

Shared media is where you show up in conversation. Social platforms, industry panels, community events, comment sections, group discussions. Shared media is the proving ground — it shows your audience that you're active, present, and engaged with the category in real time. It's also where you test ideas, build relationships with journalists and peers, and establish the visibility that leads to earned media opportunities. But shared media alone doesn't build authority. It builds presence. Presence without earned validation is just noise.

Owned media is what you control. Your newsletter, your website, your blog, your podcast, your published frameworks, your book. Owned media is the intellectual property layer — it proves that you have a distinct methodology, not just opinions. It's where you go deep on your perspective without editorial filters. But owned media without distribution (shared) and validation (earned) is a library with no visitors.

Paid media is where you invest for reach. Sponsored content, promoted posts, advertising, paid speaking. We mention it for completeness, but for most leaders building category authority, paid is the last lever to pull — useful for amplifying what's already working, not for establishing authority from scratch.

The System, Not the Channels

The channels work as a system: you develop your perspective and test it in shared channels (conversations, social engagement, panel discussions). What resonates gets developed into owned assets (a newsletter piece, a blog post, a framework on your website). What has legs gets pitched or positioned for earned coverage (a byline in trade press, a podcast interview, a journalist citing you as an expert source).

Each channel reinforces the others. Earned coverage gives you credibility that makes your shared media engagement more authoritative. Owned content gives you the intellectual property that journalists reference when they write about your category. Shared engagement builds the relationships that lead to earned opportunities.

When the system is working, every piece of content you create compounds — each one makes the next one land harder, reach further, and build more authority. When the system is broken — when you're posting on social media but have no earned coverage, or you have a great newsletter but nobody knows it exists, or you got featured in a major outlet once but had nothing for people to find when they looked you up — the channels work against each other instead of together.

The Fundamentals of What Lands

We are not going to give you a template for what to say. Templates produce content that sounds like everyone else, and the entire point of category authority is that your voice is distinct.

What we will give you is an understanding of the elements that make communication land with authority — so you can pull the right levers depending on your context, your audience, and your channel.

These draw on established principles from rhetorical theory (Aristotle's logos, pathos, ethos), public narrative (Marshall Ganz's work on values-driven storytelling at Harvard), and the practical craft of earned media strategy. They're not a formula to follow in order. They're a palette to draw from based on what the moment requires.

Framing

Framing is the context you set before you make your argument. It's the most powerful lever in communications because it determines how your audience encounters your idea — and a well-framed perspective feels like the logical conclusion rather than a random opinion.

Weak framing announces a position: "Leaders should invest in their communications infrastructure." (Opinion. Easy to dismiss.)

Strong framing creates the conditions for inevitability: "The institutions that used to confer credibility on leaders are disappearing. Newsrooms are contracting. Awards have proliferated to the point of meaninglessness. The leaders who recognize this shift are building their own credibility infrastructure. The ones who wait will become invisible." (Now the argument is inevitable before you've made it.)

Framing matters more than any other element because it determines whether your audience is receptive before you say a single word about your actual position. In earned media, framing is what makes a pitch compelling — a journalist decides to cover your story based on the frame, not the facts. In shared media, framing is what stops someone from scrolling. In owned media, framing is what turns a blog post into a perspective piece that gets cited.

Specificity

Specificity is the concrete detail that only someone with real experience would know. It's the difference between sounding like you're summarizing other people's ideas and sounding like you've been in the room.

Generic expertise says: "Climate tech companies need patient capital to succeed." (Anyone with a search engine could produce this.)

Specific authority says: "Of the twenty-three climate startups we funded between 2019 and 2022, the fourteen with five-year runway commitments hit commercial milestones. The nine on eighteen-month cycles either pivoted to faster-revenue models or folded — not because the technology failed, but because the capital structure did." (Only someone with direct operational knowledge says this. It cannot be replicated by a competitor.)

In earned media, specificity is what makes you quotable — journalists want the concrete detail, not the abstract principle. In pitching, it's what separates a generic expert from the expert source. In shared media, it's what makes your post feel like insight rather than commentary.

Stakes

Stakes answer the question your audience is always silently asking: "Why should I care about this right now?"

Content without stakes is educational. Content with stakes is urgent. Stakes create the tension that makes your perspective feel necessary rather than optional.

No stakes: "Here are three ways to think about patient capital in climate tech." (Informative. Skippable.)

Real stakes: "The clean energy tax credits your portfolio depends on are being reviewed for elimination. The funds that built capital structures assuming those credits would exist are about to discover whether their thesis was a strategy or a subsidy play. Yours is one of them." (Now it's personal, and the reader has to reckon with which side they're on.)

Stakes are particularly important in earned media, because editors evaluate whether a story matters to their readers. A pitch without stakes is a pitch without urgency. A pitch with stakes is a story that demands to be told.

Identity

Identity is the lived experience that earns you the right to say what credentials alone cannot. Marshall Ganz calls this the "Story of Self" — the values expressed through your personal history that give your public narrative authenticity and moral authority.

Credentials establish rank. Identity establishes trust. The distance between the two is the distance between "she's qualified to speak on this" and "she's the one who should be speaking on this."

A credential says: "As a managing partner with fifteen years in climate investing..." Identity says: "I started this fund after watching my hometown flood three years in a row and realizing that the capital markets had priced in the risk but not the people. When I say climate adaptation is an investment thesis, I'm not quoting a white paper — I'm describing why I left a comfortable career to build something that didn't exist yet."

Not every communication requires identity. A technical analysis doesn't need personal narrative. But the communications that build the deepest authority — the keynotes that get remembered, the op-eds that get shared, the interviews that establish you as irreplaceable — almost always draw on identity. It's the element that makes your perspective feel rooted rather than performed.

Invitation

Invitation turns a statement into a conversation. It's the move that transforms your audience from passive consumers of your perspective into active participants in the narrative you're building.

Broadcasting says: "Here's what I believe about the future of our industry." Inviting says: "We've been experimenting with a model that challenges conventional wisdom. Here's what we're seeing. Who else is trying something like this?"

Invitation matters because authority is not a monologue. The leaders who build lasting category positions create space for their audience to participate — to add their experience, challenge the premise, share their own data. This builds a constituency around your perspective that is far more powerful than any individual piece of content.

In shared media, invitation drives engagement that's substantive rather than performative. In earned media, it creates the story angle — a journalist covering a movement is more compelling than a journalist profiling an individual. In owned media, it builds the community that sustains your authority over time.

Using These Elements Situationally

You don't need all five in every communication. You need the right ones for the moment.

A LinkedIn comment responding to a peer's post might only need specificity — one concrete detail that adds to the conversation and signals your expertise.
An op-ed during a crisis might need framing, stakes, and identity — establishing why this moment matters, what's at risk, and why your specific experience makes your perspective essential.
A keynote might use all five — framing the challenge, grounding it in specific evidence, establishing the stakes, drawing on your personal story, and inviting the audience to act.
A pitch to a journalist might only need framing and stakes — here's why this story matters right now, and here's what your readers will miss if you don't cover it.

The skill isn't in applying a template. It's in reading the context and knowing which levers to pull. That judgment is what develops over time, and it's what separates leaders who build authority from leaders who produce content.

Agentic and Sustained Opportunity

Every authority strategy operates on two timelines simultaneously. Conflating them — or focusing on one while ignoring the other — is one of the most common strategic mistakes.

Agentic opportunity is the move you can make right now to claim space. It's a response to a current moment, a gap in the conversation, a platform where your voice is needed and missing. Agentic moves are high-leverage and time-sensitive — the window opens and closes. They tend to happen in shared and owned channels because those are the ones you control: a LinkedIn post responding to breaking industry news, an op-ed submitted while the topic is still in the news cycle, an email to a journalist who's covering a story you have direct insight on.

The power of agentic opportunity is immediacy. The risk is that it doesn't compound — one great post or one timely quote doesn't build lasting authority unless it's connected to a larger strategy.

Sustained opportunity is the infrastructure you build over months or years that makes your authority uncatchable. These are the strategic media placements, the recurring columns, the conference keynotes, the awards, the partnerships, the published frameworks — the signals that permanently shift how the market perceives you. Sustained opportunities tend to involve earned media because those are the channels with the longest shelf life and the highest credibility signal. A byline in your industry's leading publication lives forever. A keynote at the flagship conference establishes fixture status. An award creates permanent association.

The power of sustained opportunity is compounding. The risk is that it takes time, and leaders who only plan for the long game miss the moments that could have accelerated everything.

The strategic skill is running both simultaneously. Your weekly engagement — reading the landscape, responding to what's happening, being present in your category — feeds your agentic moves. Your quarterly planning — building media relationships, pitching bylines, applying for speaking slots, developing owned IP — feeds your sustained positioning. Each agentic win creates momentum for the next sustained opportunity. Each sustained placement amplifies the authority behind your agentic moves.

When the system is running, it feels like flywheel: every action makes the next one easier, and the gap between your expertise and your visibility closes progressively until they match.

When It's Working — And the Trap of Losing Momentum

You'll know the strategy is working when the signals shift:

Journalists start coming to you instead of you pitching them. Speaking invitations arrive for conferences you didn't apply to. Peers reference your frameworks or your language in their own content. Potential clients say "I've been following you for months" in the first meeting. People in your industry say "I see you everywhere."

These signals don't arrive all at once. They arrive gradually, and the temptation at every stage is to stop — to let up on the rhythm because you're busy with the work the authority generated. This is the most common failure mode, and it's worth naming explicitly.

The momentum trap works like this: You publish consistently for three months. You land a great media placement. Business picks up because of the visibility. You get busy serving the new clients. You stop publishing. The visibility fades. Within six months, you're back to where you started — except now you have proof that the strategy works, which makes the loss feel worse.

The leaders who build lasting authority are the ones who treat their communications infrastructure the way they treat their operational infrastructure: as something that requires consistent investment regardless of how busy they are. This might mean a weekly rhythm that takes thirty minutes — reading your industry's coverage, engaging with two or three peer conversations, and publishing one perspective. It might mean a monthly rhythm that includes one substantial piece of owned content and one earned media pursuit. The cadence matters less than the consistency.

What matters is that you never fully go quiet. Because in a media landscape where attention is fragmented and institutional memory is short, the voice that disappears is the voice that gets replaced.

Engaging Before Publishing

One more principle that's worth stating explicitly, because it's the one most authority-building advice skips:

Before you try to lead the conversation, join it.

Find who else is writing, publishing, and speaking about your category. Read their work. Engage with it substantively — not performatively, not with generic reactions, but with the kind of thoughtful response that signals you belong in the conversation. Comment on a peer's post with a specific insight that adds to their argument. Share a journalist's article with your own perspective on what they covered. Reference a conference speaker's framework and build on it.

This does three things simultaneously. First, it builds the relationships that lead to earned media opportunities — journalists notice who's engaging thoughtfully with their coverage, and peers notice who's adding value to the conversation. Second, it de-risks your own positioning — by spending time in the existing conversation before trying to lead it, you develop a much more accurate sense of what's been said, what's missing, and where your voice adds the most value. Third, it establishes you as a participant in the category before you claim authority over it — which makes your eventual leadership position feel earned rather than assumed.

The leaders who show up trying to lead a conversation they haven't been part of get dismissed. The leaders who join the conversation, add value consistently, and then gradually shift its direction are the ones who become fixtures.

How to Scale This

This framework is designed to work on its own. Define your category. Read your context. Build the infrastructure. The model is open because the principles should be accessible to anyone willing to do the work.

The leaders who act on this will start seeing signals within weeks — peers engaging differently, journalists responding, opportunities arriving that didn't exist before — because they stopped waiting to be recognized and started building the conditions for recognition to find them.

Authority is not granted. It is built.

How to Win Your Category