Creating the CIAM Market Category at Janrain

I started with the customer's changing world rather than our product. Digital marketers were suddenly responsible for engaging consumers across an increasing number of devices and digital experiences, and existing identity systems weren't designed for that reality. Instead of asking how we describe our product, we asked what problem the market was now facing.

We built a category narrative before talking about the product, structuring messaging around five core elements: the major change happening in the market; the new problem that change created; why the current way of solving that problem was no longer effective; what success would look like if companies solved it; and the capabilities required to reach that future state. Only after establishing those ideas did we introduce our solution.

We repositioned the status quo as the real competitor. Our primary competition wasn't another software vendor—it was cookies and device-specific tracking, which had become inadequate in a multi-device world. By clearly articulating why the old approach no longer worked, we created urgency for a new one.

We defined the category around the customer problem as Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)—a unified customer identity, secure access management, rich customer profiles combining demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data, and a complete understanding of interactions across digital channels. We then aligned the market by engaging industry analysts, validating the framework through ongoing conversations, and socializing the narrative internally so product, marketing, leadership, and customer-facing teams told a consistent story. Over time, competitors, analysts, and the broader industry began adopting the same terminology.

Several strategic frameworks and practices made this work successful:

• Customer and market research — Studied changes in customer behavior as digital experiences expanded across devices, focusing on market shifts before discussing products.
• Category narrative framework — Structured positioning around market change, customer problems, limitations of existing approaches, the desired future state, and category requirements, keeping messaging customer-centric rather than feature-centric.
• Positioning methodology — Built messaging around why customers should rethink the problem before introducing our solution, and framed the status quo—not competitors—as the primary obstacle.
• Analyst engagement — Worked closely with industry analysts to pressure-test our thinking, refine the narrative, and validate market direction.
• Internal alignment — Socialized the narrative across the organization so every team communicated a consistent story.

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) became the standard language used to describe this market. Competitors adopted the terminology, industry analysts began covering the category, and it remains widely used today by major technology companies. Janrain successfully evolved from being known for a single social login product into the recognized leader of a much larger strategic market. The company ultimately grew from an early-stage startup into a business with approximately 200 employees and roughly $15 million in annual recurring revenue before being acquired by Akamai, where the technology became the foundation of its Customer Identity and Access Management offering.

More importantly, this experience fundamentally changed how I think about product marketing. I learned that category creation isn't about inventing clever names—it's about helping customers make sense of a changing world, giving them language to describe an emerging problem, and positioning your company as the guide that helps them solve it.