Trout on Strategy is an Acquired Taste

There are plenty of ways to clear a room full of marketers. Telling them about the half-price sushi across the street or sending in a sales guy who’s behind on quota both come to mind.  But the most effective way has got to be the S-Word. Simply mumbling “…but is this really on strategy?” will cause Moleskines® to snap closed and jaws to clench. “I think we need better strategic alignment here…” will send them scurrying for the doors, and “…can you explain your strategy?” will guarantee they avoid you for weeks. And why? Because the dirty little secret in almost all companies is that nobody really knows what strategy is.

Corner any two executives and ask them to tell you the corporate strategy and they will spin it on their noses like Marineland seals, but ask them what a strategy is, what it means to be strategic, and how you know you’re strategic and they’ll squirm like a couple of Hand-Wringers at an Outward Bound ropes course.

Which explains why there are tens of thousands of books about business strategy, including Jack Trout on Strategy
(affiliate link).  Just to be clear, this is one of those scraped together collections of ideas from Trout’s many books, though it’s more coherent and slightly less shameless than most (Tom Peters, are you listening?).

This is actually three summarized books. The first is a fun trip through differentiation (from Differentiate or Die: Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition –– affiliate link) and it’s worth reading if you are thinking of pitching customer service or quality as a point of differentiation (don’t). Trout argues that these are seen by customers as table stakes and not something on which you can build positive differentiation. Things that can be used to differentiate include being first, owning an attribute (like taste), being a leader, especially a big one or owning a category by being the number one seller or best performer. Hotness is also a differentiator. He sums it up rather well: “If you don’t have a point of difference, you’d better have a low price.”

The second book (siphoned out of Bottom Up Marketing — affiliate link) is where he gets around to competition, and this is where it gets interesting. Especially the bit on page 70 where he asserts his bottom-up thesis about starting with tactics to build strategy.

If you are at the bottom of your company’s marketing heap, now is a good time to grab your umbrella. “In other words, strategy should be developed from a deep knowledge of and involvement in the actual tactics of the business itself.” Oh yes he did! Old Jack just dropped this steaming pile on your desk. The good news is your Corporate Overlords think it’s still on their desks right next to the Sun Tzu paperclip holder.

For those of us who have spent years being accused of being too tactical, this should come as good news, which it sort of does, except that it turns out our understanding of what a tactic is and isn’t probably also needs considerable help. So let’s get to it:

“In our definition, a strategy is not a goal. It’s a coherent marketing direction. A strategy is coherent in the sense that it is focused on the tactic that has been selected. A strategy encompasses coherent marketing activities. Product, pricing, distribution, advertising – all the activities that make up the marketing mix must be coherently focused on the tactic. …Once the strategy is established, the direction shouldn’t be changed.”

Tactics, on the other hand, are ideas that exist independently of time and externally to the product, service and company. A tactic is a competitive advantage which the strategy is sworn to maintain.  So if we start with tactics we end up with Trout’s concept of bottom-up marketing: “Find a tactic that will work, and then build it into a strategy. Find one tactic, not two or three or four.”

The rest of this book meanders through the rest of Trout’s books and unpacks what strategy is all about (if you’re in a hurry it’s differentiation, simplicity, specialization, leadership, and reality). He is particularly unkind to research, and most of us would do well to copy this quote and paste it in the cell next to our research budgets: “A company’s strategy goes wrong when the company is conned by subtle research and arguments about where the world is headed. (Nobody really knows, but many make believe they know.). These views are carefully crafted and usually mixed in with some false assumptions disguised as facts.”

If you’re feeling a little crowded out by focus group reports and piles of quantitative twaddle, Jack will forgive you if you set the whole lot of it on fire and use his handy attribute rating technique on page 101 to grab a little market insight.

He’s not all that big on goal-setting either, though I doubt this book is a hall pass out of the upcoming World of Borecraft that passes for annual planning in most companies. The problem, he says, is that managers who focus on goals spend their time trying to force things to happen just as they planned and ignore entirely the things they can exploit right in front of them.

Bottom line is you either agree with Jack or you don’t agree with Jack. In general, I don’t agree with Jack. I think his call for simplicity, while valuable, underestimates the real world in which most marketers function. I’m also not entirely on board with the whole bottom-up thing. That’s probably more linked with a knack for surviving corporate reorganizations than it is successfully selling anything, but I don’t think I’m unique.

What he does help us understand is the need to actually know what strategy is and what it looks like if you meet it in the elevator one morning. It’s also helpful to understand what tactics are and how they differ both from activities and strategies. If you do nothing more than read the middle few pages on this and get your marketing department to sign on to the concepts, you’ll be on your way.

If you’ve not yet read any Jack Trout (or his ex-pal Al Ries), this is a really good place to start and you probably needn’t bother with any of his other titles unless you’re interested (I actually wrote “hooked” and took it out — you’re welcome). If, however, you’ve been wading through the Trout pond (sorry) for years, you can give this one a miss.

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help organizations build their brands through great conversations with employees and customers

Drop me a line at ewilliams(at)candlerchase.com
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