The Marketing Playbook

Good Books: (via Emergic) The Marketing Playbook by John Zagula and Richard Tong is about how to stay ahead with unique marketing vocabulary + commonsense in any market. It's a good book + you learn to think differently so that you are able to adapt to appropriate business environment (s) no matter where you live.

Jack Covert reviewed the book for 800-CEO-Blog:
There are two basic types of business books - descriptive and prescriptive. I gravitate toward the prescriptive. I like books that give 10 ways to solve a problem. Many business book readers are the same. They want a "how to" book to get them started. The Marketing Playbook by John Zagula and Richard Tong fits into this category perfectly.

While at Microsoft, the authors noticed patterns in the marketing plans the company was implementing. The main thing was there weren't many variations to the plans. In the book, they describe five "marketing plays" that will works for any situation. They have given them easy to remember names (Drag Race, Stealth, Best of Both, High-Low, and Platform). They describe in detail how to run each play, how to identify which play to run, and what play to run if the current one starts to fail.

Publisher’s Weekly wrote about the book (via Amazon):
This engaging primer contends that all marketing campaigns can be boiled down to five basic strategies, a typology distilled from the authors experience as marketing executives at Microsoft and as venture capitalists. The "plays," schematized with football diagrams, are: the "drag race," in which your product squares off against a single competitor in an attention-getting battle for market dominance; the "platform play" in which your product becomes the essential infrastructure for an entire industry (a Windows); the "stealth play," in which you go after markets ignored by larger competitors; the "best of both" play, in which your breakthrough product becomes all things to all men; and the "high-low" play, in which you pit both your deluxe high-end product line and your cheapo down-market line against a rival’s mediocre compromise offering.

The companion blog offers continuing insights on marketing.

Here is an excerpt from The Marketing Playbook by John Zagula and Richard Tong:
It may seem hard to believe, but our experience with hundreds of businesses and their specific challenges has shown over and over that there is always one obvious basic strategy that’s right for the situation. Once selected, your play becomes a starting point; it’s your path, your line of attack. From it, the rest of your in-market action plan comes to life.

Remember that there are only five plays to pick from. Here they are:

Drag Race: In some circumstances, your best bet calls for singling out one competitor and putting the pedal to the metal racing against them to win the category. This can be quite exciting, so it’s a really tempting choice. But you better have what it takes to beat them over the finish line.

Platform: Success can be hell. Once you’ve secured a lead in your category, you have to hold on to it and make the most of it. Standing on your platform at the top of the category, you need to be on the lookout. You must gather allies and defenses. Sounds kind of boring. But it’s essential. Success begets envy and you never know from where a new challenger is likely to emerge.

Stealth: Just because you’re not strong enough yet to win the battle doesn’t mean you can’t win the war. In this play, you undermine the status quo in your market by whittling away at the incumbent’s weak points. And maybe even by making them look foolish. But remember, you still have to stay out of their way and survive. Big, dumb, slow competitors can still squish you.

Best-of-Both: Go ahead, have your cake and eat it, too. While in many cases the smart decision is to focus, requiring a trade-off at the high-end or low-end of the market, in the right circumstances you don’t have to. With this play, instead you gain dominance over the whole of the category by collapsing these two ends. If you appeal to the most important needs of each part of the market, you can win them all.

High-Low: Compromise is for weaklings. With this play, you try to close out the competition by splitting the category and owning both halves. It takes a lot of finesse, but when you need to keep a competitor from establishing a Best-of-Both foothold, you need to appeal to the distinct prejudices of both the elites and the common folk, the high end and the cheap. This is the hardest play to manage, but if it’s done right, you’ll achieve high volumes and high margins at the same time.

In choosing the right play, there are some important questions you will need to ask yourself. Different plays are best suited to different conditions. Different plays require different strengths. Do you have the right ones to pull off your choice? Some plays are riskier than others. How tough are your nerves? Depending on the play, succeeding can take a long time. Do you have the time, patience, and resources? After all that, how big is the goal you’re after? Is it achievable? Is it worth it?