John Zagula

Battle Tested Plays Lead to Marketing Victories
The authors, using their Microsoft experience, offer five strategies for marketing products and services.

Their book sees marketing as a team sport that requires five plays to create a winning campaign.

The five plays:

1. The Drag Race – Pick a single competitor to which to compare yourself. Then put everything into beating it.
2. The Platform Play – Ignore the competition. Focus on being from which the entire industry can succeed. Make it easy and profitable to do business for others to partner and do business with you.
3. The Stealth Play – Focus on a specific niche where you can build your strength unnoticed. Peacefully co-exist with market leaders. Remember to stay out of the way of big competitors who can squish the life out of you.
4. The Best-of-Both Play - Dominate a category by collapsing both high- and low-end product into a single offer. This strategy allows customers to have it both ways.
5. The High-Low Play – The opposite of point #4. With this play to squeeze the competition by dominating both the high and low end.

To succeed, say the authors, who spent years as marketing executives at Microsoft launching successful brands and marketing popular product lines, you must do your homework. That means looking at the history, seeing the industry as it is today, and looking for levers to create dynamic openings.

The authors have written a readable book. Its conversational tone makes it a useful resource for marketers at both large and small companies.… (meer)