Finally, A Marketing Book That Helps

Interesting things happen when we tidy up. A recent attempt to dissuade certain loved ones from calling the producers of Hoarders turned up an Economist magazine so old it was saying nice things about Merrill Lynch, a copy of The Marketing Playbook and, ironically, an article about personal organization with three pages missing.

So naturally I stopped cleaning and sat down to read the Playbook. Published in 2004 by two ex Microsoft folks, this book has probably been in my reading pile almost that long. And it’s aged a lot better than the pillow mint I was evidently using as a bookmark when I started reading it.

The deal is this: there are five ways to attack a market. Not four. Not six. And for each “play” there are considerations, strategies, risks and potential payoffs.

The Drag Race is your basic American Graffiti scene but with companies squaring off over qualitative comparisons such as features, price or other directly comparable attributes. As with all the chapters in this book, this has plenty of real-world examples, including some B2B beauties, mostly to do with Microsoft.  The challenger calls out the incumbent and kicks off a race for market share. Salesforce.com successfully beat Siebel using ease-of-use vs. feature bloat; Hyundai took on Honda on the basis of same-car-better-price and, apparently Microsoft had no choice but to squish Netscape when it dared to start a browser race.

It’s a bit ridiculous to assert that Netscape was killed only because it dared to drag race Microsoft. We’re not talking about an inconvenient bee in the car, here. But the lesson works because one of the caveats is to make sure your rival is actually beatable and that you have a plan for when they push back. This play is a favourite with sales people because it’s very public and offers lots of levers to pull. “A Drag Race is a spectator sport. The fans are looking for blood. Give it to them”. What fun!

The Platform Play is for the top dog in a market. It’s a great big play where, as leader, you marry your success with that of your industry and invite partners, suppliers and users to join you in fending off the pretenders. Intel, Amazon and Marvel Comics are great examples, as is  iTunes (but more on that later). This is a difficult strategy that requires you to play very nicely with others, especially your partners. “Just because you’re in a position to run a platform play doesn’t mean you’re immune to competition. In fact, by virtue of your leadership position, you’re a bigger and more tempting target for new entrants.” Oh dear.

Speaking of new entrants, can I interest you in a Stealth Play? This is a nifty move if you’re on the sidelines while bigger players are drag racing or doing the platform thing. This play asks you to look for gaps. Things like overlooked market niches, under-served geographies, parts of the market the big players can’t monetize or plain old  feature gaps you can fill. This is the safest of the plays but also the one that allows little rest. Eventually your competition will find you. With luck, you will have filled a niche so well they will cede it to you, or so horribly they will fill it with you inside. Norton and Cisco both used this play to address gaps Microsoft left in the market. Enterprise car rentals thrived by targeting overlooked insurers instead of end users.

Best of Both is your classic run straight up the middle between trade-offs. Much like Microsoft NT found space between IBM’s AS 400 midrange systems and DOS-based PCs.  Or the way tablets landed in between smartphones and notebooks. This is an ideal play for unsettled market conditions. “To run this play, you will have to have some lasting product or technology or other advantage that allows you to collapse both ends and run up the middle.”

If that one sounds too compromise-y, our last play is High-Low, and it’s the opposite of Best of Both. In this rare and difficult play, the trick is to have effective offerings at the bottom and the top. Sheraton, for example, stakes out the high-end while its Four Points properties hang out in dodgy neighbourhoods where the turn-down service can start a knife fight. Done well, this play can effectively trap a competitor in the middle, holding a giant bag of compromise and looking a bit foolish.

But wait, there’s more! This is a very well-written book. The style is nicely balanced and it moves along swiftly. Each chapter ends with a succinct list of take-aways and for each play, the authors provide tips on handling the five P’s.

Part Two is the hands-dirty stuff you need to do to get to the point of running a play. If you are new to an industry or just floundering with a market strategy, work through the gap and competitive analysis models. You’ll probably find the nuggets you need to move forward.

Part Three is a great idea for new teams or new managers. It deals with campaign teams, roles, responsibilities and so on. But hidden in this final bit of the book is a wonderful pitch-building technique called Yes-But-So. See page 260 if you’re fighting with the sales guys. If you need help writing positioning statements and core messages, you will find it here.

It is interesting, and a bit of a relief that this book makes almost no mention of Apple. I think we can agree that I’m fairly sick of Apple as the non plus ultra of all things marketing but this book could do with fewer Microsoft war stories.

All in all, an excellent find in the Leaning Tower of Reading beside the bed and something I would consider required reading for any team planning a product launch. I would love to see John Zagula and Richard Tong update this book sometime soon.

Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
Follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
or email escwilliams@gmail.com