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October 30, 2004

Top online reviews of the playbook

Top online reviews judging by looking at MSN Search, referrer logs and of course Google. As a minor aside, it is still amazing to me how different MSN and Google query results are:

• Cheskin. Thanks again Chris!
• Ty Trible. Thanks Ty for the review and kind words.
• Marketing VOX. Approachable and fun to read is what he says and we're glad. He's also right that the tactical parts are a little harder because you have to be more general. Heck, that's what this site is for.
• Gaping Void. A great analysis of how the book and this blog work together. Its about the ideas, not the media. He calls it triangulated media. A cool idea.
• TJ's Weblog. He loves the ideas in the drag race, the play that teaches you everything else.
• FrogBlog. He loves the interview with Jason at 37signals.
• Marketing Meta Blog. An interesting idea, take all blogs that are categorized as marketing and merge their RSS feeds.
• Heather Leigh. Well she hasn't read the book yet, but she'll get one soon we hope and love it ;-)

Posted by rich at 09:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sitemeter

One of the most interesting things to do when you are doing web promotions is to look at your referrer logs. These tell you how folks got to your site. Now our hoster, Mark has a huge number of tools that tell you everything and nothing.

Like most marketing things, the best tools are the simplest. In this case, Sitemeter is simple enough to understand. You can look at referrers and see where folks are coming from.

This lets us figure out where the various online reviews are so that we can link to them and participate in discussions of like minded folks.

Posted by rich at 09:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Our Book as a sales study

OK, this is not boastful or anything, but like anyone else, we are always curious about sellthrough and competition. Its interesting to see how this works with Amazon since they are so transparent. I wish all markets were so easy to analyze

Net, net, Amazon tracks best selling marketing books. We've been in the top 10 since we released (actually hit no.1 when we shipped).

Rough history has been as of each Saturday the book has been out.

Week 1. No 1 for marketing (#199 overall for against all 250K or so books)
Week 2. No 15 for marketing (#2,049 overall)
Week 3. No 5 for marketing (#1,045 overall)

The most interesting trend so far has been the bounce back in week 3. This is a little bit unusual, but it could be that the original splash were influentials, then there is a digestion period and then the word of mouth spreads. Right now, we have 33 reviews on Amazon for instance and that number seems to be growing well.

Any authors out there have similar sellthrough curves. We didn't talk about it in the book, but knowing the sales by time can tell you a lot if you have a history.

Some products have a slow burn and then exponential growth, others pop and then fizzle. One topic we missed in the playbook because there was limited space.

Posted by rich at 08:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Lessons from an "up and coming market"

The Origin of Brands Blog: An up and coming market. Really interesting analysis by Laura Ries of how the (ahem) erectile disfunction market has worked. Some interesting lessons:

1. It is better to be first than it is to be better.
2. A #2 brand that only differentiated by claiming "better" is rarely a big success (not a good enough way to win a dragrace)
3. If you can’t be first, set up a new (sub)category you can be first in.
4. PR builds brands. Advertising maintains them. (This is one to drill home to every start-up)
5. The target is not necessarily the same as the market. (another great lesson - seperate your thinking of your market gap from how you want to target the product, aspirations matter)
6. Names matter. (I am always a huge proponent of putting the time in to come up with the right naming)

Posted by johnza at 07:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Nike vs. New Balance: Comparative Positioning

A great positioning analysis from Ageless marketing. Really worth reading. Clearly both have been very successful at creating and supporting distinct, powerful, pointed positioning. And clearly I am getting older - I no longer see myself as a greek god, I have flat feet and wear new balance shoes.

Posted by johnza at 07:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New MT 3.0 Layout

Finally fixed the site to use MovableType 3.0 format. Send me notes if you see bugs. Also comments now require Typepad registration. Sorry. The spam is so incredible.

Posted by rich at 12:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 28, 2004

Ignition III

Just wanted to share the announcement that Ignition Partners just completed raising our third fund. It sure says a lot for the terrific entreprenuers we have the priviledge of working with. Suffice it to say, we are extremely happy to be part of this team and we are humbled and inspired by the awesome support we have received.

Posted by johnza at 04:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 27, 2004

Grommets That Grab You

Doug Mockett is one of my favorite sites. They are a great example of a very, very specific niche business that was born to be on the web. Tons of wierd selection of fasters, grommets, hooks, knobs etc. Ship anywhere. I think there is a big alternative to Walmart, EBay, Home Depot, and Best Buy and it is sites like these. They also have great customer service.

Posted by johnza at 08:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Keyhole and Google

Nice discussion from John Battelle on Google and Keyhole (the satelite mapping company just bought by Google), including a talk with former Keyhole CEO, John Hanke. Interesting to follow:
* 12 terabytes and growing
* geoblogging - allowing you to fly around Keyhole's data and write about spots of interests ("globemarks"?)
* overlays of real time traffic information
* and more

Mega, mega. Now Microsoft and Yahoo have to turn to a dragrace of global proportions ;-)

Posted by johnza at 08:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 24, 2004

Bits, Books, Blogs and Brands - Living Beings, Not Dead Objects

Recently, I talked to two bloggers I respect a ton (Scoble and MacLeod) about our book. Sure it was flattering that they both liked the book but what was really interesting was that these seperate conversations both launched into parallel, very intesting discussions about where technology, media and brands are going. And that these same themes seem reflected in numerous synchronous discussions around the blogsphere.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about a common theme of dynamism. Of the whole being more than the sum, of involvement, of interaction, of creative destruction that keeps things alive. Embracing this - or dying if you don't - seems to be something cutting across a number of dimensions lately - companies, technology, communications, brands (and, what the heck, books too).

* Companies: Maybe it's just because I've become a venture capitalist but it seems to me that a great way to drive an industry and build a great business is not just as a huge monolith, but as a community of smaller companies founded on a great idea, all working hard to push their own form of change, all moving quickly, nimbly, responding, growing, evolving... or dying and being replaced. Maybe this has always been true but lately it feels like the pace (not just hype around "internet time", the flexibility, and the dynamism has increased. Technology has definately played a part in this.

* Technology: One of the things that Scoble and I talked about (and that we talk about at Ignition all the time) was how software has changed. How it is no longer this relatively static thing that you bought in a box, installed, learned, customized and then lived with for as many years as you could. Because of the internet, because of the improvements in the core hardware, because of web services, and, at least in part, because of what the idea of open source represents, our expectations of softare have changed. We want it to be a living thing, something we can make our own, something that can keep changing, something that is, well more like a service, a relationship than just some static stuff on disk. The movement in this direction has had a huge impact on business, in the enterprise and the small/home business. There is still a long way to go to make this easier. But it is interesting. Blogs themselves are maybe both a sympton and a stimulous to this change (I can tell you that software companies big and small track what is being said in their space on the blogsphere - it is a key part of the new playingfield).

* Blogs: Robert gave Rich a bit of a hard time for saying that blogging is the only way to market, but heck blogging truly has become serious marketing. And it is (and it should) changing the way companies think of how to interact with customers. From Scoble, blogs are important because "watching blogs gives you an indication of what the greater society is doing and talking about... blogs can feed the conversation and amplify it... if you integrate bloggers into product development they feel ownership of the product or service as it comes out... word-of-mouth networks are becoming more and more efficient... blogging is cheap... blogs build much stronger relationships between customers and the company." Sounds right to me (this is definately what has happened with this blog - but blogs are also a responsibility - don't have one unless you are willing to embrace it).

* Brands: Blogs are becoming important, even critical, to brands and, heck are becoming brands in their own right. So it is especially pointed to hear, amidst all this, it turns out Scoble and MacLeod are having a dialogue of their own - about you guessed it - brands. MacLeod (and Doc Searl) both assert that branding is dead. Scoble disagrees. He says that now "branding is about starting, keeping, and capitalizing on, word of mouth." Johnnie Moore, who was listening in, highlights that we should avoid playing semantics. He makes the apt distinction between the notion of "branding" as just this abstract art of logos etc exclusive to experts, marketers and other such charlatans and the notion of "brands" as useful shorthands for ideas that we can all circle around, pro or con. Well, good points all, and here's my two (or actually five) cents, based on what seem like key aspects or qualities that brands need and how they are behaving today:

** Extensibility/Dynamism - Branding is more alive than ever and if it isn’t alive then it’s a dead brand. I could not agree more that that products/brands/companies are converstations but this whole process is making branding more accountable than ever. Companies are learning this. I guess branding is now inclusive of all the formal ID stuff but much more than that. It always has been but folks just didn’t really pay enough attention

** Identity/Personality: Scoble and Gapingvoid, and tons of other blogs are brands. They are people. You get a sense of who they are by experiencing and interacting with thier output. Consumers now expect this. They are rewarding blogs for doing this by turning them into brands. Company brands can do this too. When they become split personalities, or manic depressive, they need either to go on medication or committ suicide.

** Authenticity: No one likes a fake, and when you see one it is obvious. So be yourself. You'll feel better this way and so will the people trying to get to know you. Blogs are informal, personal. More brands need to be this way they should be honest and when it makes sense they can even be informal (Decker does a nice job of highlighting this), but it has to be you.

** Relevance/Welcome: Brands (messages, products, companies)have to matter, to someone. We you put a brand out there it doesn’t matter how loud it is. It can’t be noise (thanks Evelyn), has to be music, at least to your target's ears. Recently re-watching Ken Burns' Jazz made me think of this powerful quality - he called it "Welcome." Jazz was music originally by African America but inherently is was welcoming to all America. Brands need to say "Welcome, come on in, be a part of it."

** Value/Substance: Finally, brands have to be worth it. We don't have a lot of time or patience. For all the marketing jargon and "branding principles", even the ones I just spouted above, cannot be left in the abstract (agree with you Alain). They have to be made concrete, real and valueable for the true situation and goals you face.

* Books: Finally, what does any of this have to do with book publishing. Strangely enough, a lot. Of course we want everyone to buy our book, and of course we are proud of it. But it is also the symptom and result and a case for all of the above. In the conversations with Scoble and MacLeod, it struck me that writing the book was a continuation of a set of ongoing learning conversations we've had for years. That the blog, which started as marketing of the book became part of what the heart of the book is all about anyway. That whatever brand it has or will have is the result of both of these things. And that all of this is about dynamism, interaction, real values, learning and evolution.

Boy, it is fun to be in busines today!

Posted by johnza at 03:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Microsoft vs. Google: We Can't Seem to Get Enough

Once again, the blogsphere was filled this past week with more talk about the newest of the dragrace battles between Google and Microsoft - desktop search. And I can't help but watch and take notes either.

The latest salvo came from Microsoft when it announced that it too would have an improved desktop search before the end of the year. We'll here's some of what the blogsphere had to say:

• John Battelle of course, was not surprised - Microsoft had to respond (cute Google glasses Bill);
• Mark Williamson, scoffed at the announcement of this date, feeling that Microsoft has already lost all credibility around hitting its dates; he's still waiting for his Hotmail storage to be big enough;
• Emergic highlighted the NYT view that, although lots of folks have entered the search battle, most eyes are on Microsoft and Google with both having so much now at stake in their core business areas.
• The Unofficial Google Weblog notes that amidst all this talk of a future google browser and Microsoft search, Firefox is busy working away. The Firefox toolbar extends now to desktop search and one click access to Gmail and Gmail search. Interesting...
• John Ludwig also ponders all the Google and Firefox happenings and speculations as well as highlights his own performance and development observations and tips.

Posted by johnza at 02:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 23, 2004

Another Book - Watch for It

While we're in the midst of hyping our own book, thought we would mention someone else who is working on one.

Those of you who follow Hugh MacLeod's thought provoking, hard hittting, irreverant and sometimes slightly off-color Gaping Void, already know that he is working on his own book. If you don't, then check it out. We think it is cool.

He say's that it is based at least partly on his recent Change This manefesto entitled "How to Be Creative." You can download this PDF. I did and it is about a lot more than how to be creative. It's about how to be authentic, in business, in relationships, in life. It's challenging because it asks you to be bold and to be true to yourself but it's also realistic about being human, having faults and about how the real world will receive you.

Good show Hugh. Looking forward to the book.

Posted by johnza at 05:19 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 22, 2004

The Linux Play

A great comment from Dwight over in Portland who asked about Open Source and Microsoft's play there. He's not a Linux bigot even though he lives in Portland, but is certainly a great observer of the computer business. It was part of a great question about the Microsoft response to Open Source and whether the threat of litigation would work

I want to politely take issue for an eerie historical reason with your comment that the Microsofts latest open source riposte (essentially, beware the litigation threat from intellectual property issues) will have legs.

That litigation observation is just a bring down, in slightly different terms, of something IBM guys used to say in the heyday of Big Iron. Back then whenever someone appeared on the verge of straying from the way of Big Blue a similar threat/observation used to be heard. It was put in terms of cautionary advice to make a safe career decision, not dressed up as IP litigation risk, but had the same basic fear thrustand so the drill would turn into a survey of alternatives, evaluation of options, and recommendation of whatever IBM offered. It was effective enough initially to eventually become a standing joke.

Threats of litigation sometimes work as weedkiller to deal with minor
nuisances. But they arent a good tool for general application and, to anyone reflecting on it, dropping them is a sign of situational weakness. Interesting to see both IBM and Microsoft employing the fear cautionary, and both in the aftermath of successful antitrust defenses of their franchise, (but that last is probably a false correlative).

Anyway, enjoyed your talk. Thanks for giving it and I will look for your book when it comes out.

Posted by rich at 10:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Another Comment from a Friend

A great comment from an old buddy who is not in the technology business, but has his own business and is so thoughtful about it. He's also right that IXTAPA and Wal*Mart are great play examples respectively of stealth and drag race. Thanks Jamie!

Rich,
This is a very clear and straight forward example of something we see every day and the success of Enterprise and those that follow this model is clear.

In our neck of the woods, we see IXTAPA Mexican Restaurants. Never heard of them? Just go out to the outlying towns, Duvall, North Bend, and Monroe. Areas that haven't seen the deluge of choices most towns have for dining out.

They spot their locations, provide a great dining experience for customers that previously had to go to a larger town, and have gained a foothold and name recognition for very loyal diners. Their employee base is very good for a whole other set of reasons.

I am enjoying the excerpts enough to buy your book.

Would a behemoth that Drag Raced and stealthed be Wal-Mart? Maybe there's a chapter on Super Saturation, or "Fill Any Freakin' Open Spot". Maybe that would describe Wal-Mart better. LOL

Posted by rich at 10:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Hurt and Rescue

We talk a lot about persuation. The art of changing someone's mind. One of the methods we have is called "Yes, But, So," where the first part is acknowledgement of the target's situation, the second is introducing an issue or challenge, and the third is offering a solution.

Heard a great variant of this today from a friend who does branding, Lorraine Nay. She said that recently heard of a method called Hurt and Rescue. Check it out. It is not really negative but it is a means by which you introduce conflict/pain/trouble or highlight that it exists and then you offer the way out. Interesting technique.

Also check out this site Changing Minds. Just beginning to look at it, but looks interesting on a whole host of topics relating to persuation.

Posted by johnza at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Top 25 Business Book

Amazon.com: Top Sellers. As John points out, right now we are 419 top seller overall and 57 on the business book list.

At the peak we were 199 in the overall list and in the top 25 on the business book list I'd estimate.

Cool.

Posted by rich at 08:10 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Amazon Ranking jump to top 99.9% of all books sold

Well, we hit a high of 199 on Amazon. That the #199 bestselling book for the whole site. That's amazing. Naturally, we won't hold that, not like it was written by Donald Trump or an Apprentice. Right now its sitting at #439 which is still amazing given that this is over the course of a business day.

Thanks to everyone!

Posted by rich at 05:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 21, 2004

Book Launch Aftermath

Wow, what a fun party! Was terrific to see so many old and new friends. Pictures will come up tomorrow, but some notes:

• Scobelizer. It was great fun to meet Robert and his wife. Look forward to an interview with him. He told me that some folks don't believe that blogs can be a way to market. We told him, its the only way to do it. Just like direct mail was the technology of the 1980s, internet advertising was the 1990s, so are blogs and forums the technology of the 21st century.
• The Home Theater Spot. Speaking of which, also hung with Paul Carrolton of the Spot. He's still doing an amazing job with a speciality web site that is essentially run out of his house. Way more valuable. Robert and Paul, I sure hope you both have lunch soon, so Paul, you can learn about blogs and Robert, you can learn what cool things Paul is doing with community. And Paul, love to be a super Spottie for you.
• Lockdown. Had a great chance to catch up with Brett who runs Lockdown. Doing amazing things with making network devices safer. He's building a great team there as well.
• Digital Nervous System. While folks may not remember much of this, it was great to hang out with Carol, Midori, and the gang. What a cool time it was where things really got done in 1999. It was a time when it wasn't clear if Microsoft was relevant in the .com age and folks were still rocking and rolling. The best moment was realizing that many others besides us treasured the time and kept momentos from those days.
• Amazon Reviews. Hey, its fun to see 28 reviews up there. Thanks to the many folks who have read early drafts of the book and have seen the marketing play in action. Also, we hit 301 in sales rank. Probably the highest we'll ever get, but in the top 99.9% of all books Amazon has.
• Finally, it was great to see Emmy, Liz, Marc and Joe and talk about the bad ol'days of Office. We lived through quite a lot

Maybe the best moment was at the end of a long evening, when John Zagula's old high school friend said, "hey I can see why the book is so energetic and upbeat," look at all the folks you know. Everyone is excited about what

Posted by rich at 11:31 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Book Launch Party

Come on in. Tons of friends and collegues are joining us to celebrate the completion of this project and the arrival of our book. Lots of food, drink and fun.

Even if you couldn't make it, we would love it if you would sign the party guest book by making a comment below on our blog. Thanks a lot.

Cheers!

Posted by johnza at 06:06 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

The Book is Here!

Well, its finally here. It's in stores and Amazon.com officially starts selling the book.

We are having a virtual launch party 7-9PM Pacific with over 100 folks coming in the real world to have some fun and celebrate. You'll also see various notes from that event up here. Feel free to comment.

Also, you'll see we've updated the site with some new entries on the right and below. Most notably:

• Praise. These are the latest accolades and comments about the Playbook.
• Excerpts. You'll see that we have a few chapters that you can sample on the site now

Enjoy and let us know what you think as always with a comment or two here.

Posted by rich at 01:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

From Chapter Nine: Your Customer Playing Field

How Does Anybody with a Business to Run Do All This Customer Analysis Without Spending Tons of Time and Money?

How do you do it? You can begin to learn a lot about your customers, playing field-both current customers and potential ones-without conducting expensive market research and without wasting tons of time in focus groups. You can integrate your research into your daily conduct of business. It's not hard.

First, keep it simple.

Start small. Talk to people you know. Talk to employees, sales people, colleagues in other companies, your family-whoever is the best representative of your customer. Find out what's up in their world; ask about their problems, their needs, their goals. Drill in on their product experience and their issues with it.

Find a group of individual customers you can talk to. Get more out of your existing sales efforts by making sure you use them as a chance to learn. If you aren't already, go on a few sales calls or man the phones. It's often best to do this with the most demanding customers or prospects. As Bill Gates once said, "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." They will tell you the stuff you need to know. Ask tough questions; be prepared for tough answers. If they seem to be telling you only the good stuff that's nice to hear, don't be satisfied; ask again.

One company we work with targeted teens and found out that talking to them was a sure eye-opener. Adolescents aren't afraid to tell you what they think is cool and what isn't. But how about insurance agents? These guys were used to making sure they said the right thing-they didn't want to let down their listener and chance losing a sale. Trained to be polite and agreeable, they just kept smiling. The company folks really had to push to get them to open up about the problems they had with the company's products.

Second, keep it digestible.

As we've seen, your target customer base can be widely diverse. It really helps if you can narrow or break this discovery process into digestible chunks. There are many, many different ways to do this segmentation: competitive, demographic, psychographic, etc. But two ways seem to be most useful: segmenting by the customer's roles in the purchase process, and by their attitudes toward your category's products or technologies.

The Avogadro and American Express examples illustrate the first steps of segmentation by role in the purchase process. Taking this further, you want to know who is most interested, who holds the pocket book, whose approval is required, and so on. You're looking for the fulcrum or lever-the person whose approval is most important, whose voice on your topic carries the most weight. At Microsoft we broke this typically into four segments or targets -

• The general business user, or GBU, who, although belonging to the majority of users, tended to be a follower and had limited influence or none at all;
• The non-technical business decision maker, or BDM, who owned the budget, and whose approval was important;
• The technical decision maker, or TDM, who generally did not initiate interest in a new product but who often held a veto based on his/her judgment of whether or not it could be implemented;
• Finally, the influential end user, or IEU-the enthusiast or resident expert to whom the GBUs and BDMs turned and whose enthusiasm could often overcome or circumvent the objections of the TDM. When we were at Microsoft, we generally found that it was the influential end users who were the fulcrum.

In terms of segmentation by attitudes, one of the most useful approaches involves understanding how quickly and regularly different people or groups adopt new products-where they fit on the spectrum between bleeding edge and laggards. At Microsoft we called the segments regulars, seekers, doubters, and sleepers.

• Regulars were those who always bought.
• Seekers were those who needed sufficient information first to make a considered choice.
• Doubters were those who needed to see others adopt first before they even considered.
• And sleepers were those who only came along last, kicking and screaming all the way.

Each of these types of segmentation determines how you refine and even narrow the customer gap you are trying to fill, and when you should attempt to fill it. Those who spend more money become a higher priority. Those who are most receptive offer the easiest place to start.

Third, keep your customer analysis direct.

Doing market research and analysis is fine. But to really absorb the conclusion, you have to get your hands dirty. It's not just business, it has to get personal.

Of course, you need to meet customers up close and look them in the eye. But you can and should go beyond that. You should be one of them. You should make sure you are your own customer. It will keep you honest and it will teach you things you might not otherwise have found out.

For years we tried to understand and influence the purchasing of Office, Word, and Excel by small-business owners. We tried using the same approach with them as we did with large corporations. We tried including all kinds of fancy new products based on focus group and primary research. None of it worked. It wasn't until we really experienced for ourselves what the small business customers were experiencing that we realized where we were going wrong and changed our strategy.

While we were running all of our focus groups and surveys, a terrific summer intern, Tony Liano, who didn't know any better, went out and had business cards printed, and got a few of us to pretend to be small business people. We did our own "Secret Shopper" research. We'd go into a store, tell the salesperson we were setting ourselves up in business, and ask for his advice. And we'd make it clear that we were very budget-and time-constrained.

The salesperson would start by selling us a bunch of other things like office furniture, phones, faxes, etc. And even when he got around to selling computer technology, it would be all about the newest computer. When it came to software, he'd usually recommend a bookkeeping program and something like a simple contact manager. Office wouldn't even be mentioned. And when we asked, the sales rep would usually try to sell us something from a Microsoft competitor. Why? Because he made a better margin on them.

The same kinds of issues and priorities were confirmed in our direct discussions with other small business people-who now would talk to us as colleagues. They didn't think of themselves as running small businesses. They saw themselves foremost as contractors, or florists, or accountants.

What an eye opener. All along we had been doing "small business" campaigns and "small business products," when our target actually did not think of themselves this way. It took some hard turning but our response was to adapt to their characteristics. We made sure to target vertical industry-specific partners who provided software solutions to small businesses. And we targeted our packaging and presence to complement new PCs and grant incentives to the channels where small businesses bought their overall computing supplies.

How do your own customers think of themselves? Do they refer to themselves with the same kind of category labels you've been pasting on them?

Posted by rich at 01:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

From Chapter Nine: Your Customer Playing Field

It's amazing what you learn when you actually talk to the people who are supposed to buy your stuff.

Sounds obvious. What's the point of deeply understanding your industry, its dynamics, its gaps, and its opportunities unless you can use that knowledge to sell something to somebody?

Moving from the macro-level analysis of your industry to the micro-level analysis of your target customers within that industry is the second element of choosing the right play. Doing your homework diligently can mean the difference between an academic exercise and a sustainable business.

The same simple ABC gap analysis process you applied to your industry as a whole can also tell you some other hot and valuable stuff about your customer landscape. Like who exactly to sell to. What problems to work on solving for them. How best to turn your solutions into a product or offer, or how best to adapt and adjust your existing product or offer to provide the solution to a customer need. And in general, how to have the best chance of actually selling it to them.

You have to know who your customers are. "What?" you say. "Of course, we know." Are you sure? You might be surprised how often smart, experienced businesspeople have incomplete information or hang on to false assumptions about the people they want to sell to.

So how can you be sure you really know what you think you know? Are you ready for this? You actually go out and personally meet with customers. Scary. They might do something awful, like talk to you.

And just watch what happens: you'll learn things you couldn't find out any other way.

We saw this simple tactic work for Intelligent Results, a company with founders who knew in depth the dynamics and the gaps of their technology and industry. They also had powerful and proprietary technology that promised to close those gaps. Their timing seemed spot-on, too. A shoo-in for success, right? Guess again. They had more homework to do to get the play and its execution right.

The ABCs of Customer Demand-Turning Compelling Vision into Solutions You Can Sell

Intelligent Results (IR) is a software company in a specialized area called customer relationship analytics (CRA); it's a start-up founded by world-class analytical scientists and engineers-people who were quite used to doing complex, thorough analysis. And, surprisingly enough, they were also practical.

In terms of product, they had already done a lot of their homework when they first came to see us at Ignition. They had done their industry ABCs. They understood the benefits and limitations of current statistical modeling methods of analysis, methods that had provided lots of insight but that the IR folks recognized made use of only a limited portion of corporate data. They also knew there should be a better, more complete way that would also take advantage of data types that current analysis methods couldn't handle. And they had a key insight on the technology that would take analytics from the point A of the current situation (where analysis was based only on limited information) to a much better, more complete point B.

This understanding of the industry gap had yielded the Intelligent Results vision. It was this: Companies ought to be able to use more than just the numbers at their disposal to do business analysis. They ought to be able to use all their sources of data-structured and unstructured, numbers and words-to gain the most complete intelligence and most accurate analysis. IR even had a true technology breakthrough, all their own, that could make this possible. Making it easy to integrate and usefully apply the combination of structured transaction data and unstructured textual data became the Intelligent Results mission.

We found all of this very exciting. IR was gaining the attention of the industry cognoscenti, in particular sophisticated analysts (people like them), who were intrigued by their product.

But, despite their thorough and accurate industry assessment, they were barely making traction in actually selling the stuff.

Highly motivated to get to the bottom of the problem and start making better traction, they went out and talked to all their current customers and prospects. They came back, compared notes, and realized that their understanding of the situation, the possibilities, and the gaps was incomplete.

So they took their gap analysis to the level of potential paying customers and found the real sweet spot, the point of market entry, and the most compelling story, offering and sale.

Here's what they did -

1) They dug into their target customers' priorities-their critical needs.

The founders' former boss, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, had given them the advice that "the key to success is intense understanding of the customer." And in this they found their answer. Intelligent Results, own clients' most relevant and critical need was to better understand their customers and to predict their future behaviors. Nowhere was this more true than with the banking customers.

They dug deeper into the needs of the banking customers and discovered that with the market and economic downturn, the priorities of consumer banks and other lending institutions had shifted. These companies were progressively less focused on acquiring new customers versus predicting and mitigating potential losses from existing customers. While the banks had been using statistical analysis for decades to help predict default, there was a new sense of urgency to find new tools to bear on the problem. And they were willing to spend real money to do so.

This observation identified Intelligent Results' best initial customer target and yielded its first truly concrete offering. They courted risk and credit officers in consumer financial institutions, offering new customer relationship analytic (CRA) software that would allow lenders to utilize much more information about their customers, from all the various sources, so they could more accurately predict and address potential defaults. And they began to find plenty of people willing to write a check for it.

To be sure you know what your customers want, you have to get answers to these questions:

• What are the priorities of your customers?
• Are they urgent?
• Are they willing to pay for a solution?
• Do you understand their critical needs?
• Are you prepared to address those needs?

2) The company chose the specific customers they wanted to target initially, and evaluated their obstacles and issues.

One of the great things about the banking target was their level of sophistication. The banks' own analysts and credit people had intuitively understood that there ought to be predictive value in the unstructured text they possessed from customer communications. But they had been frustrated in their efforts to make it useful.

So, even with all their urgency and with a no-brainer ROI promise, the company's target customers' constraints were limiting their options. They had existing processes and software that helped them manage collections. It was important that they be able to efficiently tap into this new source of data and make it usable quickly, without requiring a big change in behavior or a daunting infrastructure investment.

Understanding these constraints helped Intelligent Results refine their offering even more. To avoid barriers to customer adoption, they made sure their solutions integrated with the common banking software and did not interfere with existing systems. This made its unique value more immediate and useful by reducing the barriers of customer adoption.

For trying to reach your own customers, what are the issues and purchase constraints? Do you know how to overcome them?

3) They looked at other products and systems that their these customers and prospects had already bought.

They respected those decisions and they made sure to interoperate with those products easily.

4) They looked at how these customers went about buying.

Intelligent Results discovered that their clients' shift in priorities had also caused a shift in their purchase dynamics. The relative power of the credit or risk officer had increased inside the bank. But so had his/her accountability. The company recognized that selling to these folks would have to include real proof of the solutions' effectiveness using live data. This added some time to the process but eventually it significantly greased the way to making the sale.

How do your customers buy? What steps do they need to take before making decisions? What are their relative roles in the purchase process?

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From Chapter Eight: Mapping Overall Industry Gaps

One very important common element distinguishes companies that will become has-beens from those that will be their industry's heroes. Something big.

They pay attention. In many cases if not most, the biggest element that separates the players we remember from the players that came and disappeared is that the winners held a profound understanding of the dynamics of their industry. They found a hole, a gap in the market. The bigger the gap they filled, the bigger the company's success and legacy. They found this by, guess what...looking.

Picking the right play for any particular situation begins with discovering the gaps that represent the best opportunities in your overall industry. Doing homework on your industry will help you discern between a pothole, a challenging but manageable leap, and an insurmountable grand canyon. That homework can spell the difference between being lauded as a champion, being forgotten as an also-ran, or being scraped off the pavement as road kill.

An example: We all drive cars, but who do you think of as the biggest heroes of the enormous automotive industry? Car history buffs might name people like Nicolas Joseph Cugnot, Siegfried Marcus, Nikolaus August Otto.

But for the majority, the name of Henry Ford would first come to mind.

What Does Your Business Have in Common with the Model T?

Cugnot built the first automobile in 1769; it was steam powered and was a milestone even though it only managed 2-1/2 mph. In 1864, Marcus, figuring that gasoline might work better than steam, stuck a gas-powered engine on a cart and managed to drive a whole 500 feet. Three years later, Otto invented the four-stroke internal combustion engine.

All three were super-smart, pioneering guys who made tremendous contributions to our lives. Without them or others like them, we'd likely still be measuring horsepower in one-horse and two-horse units. So why don't we remember them? Why is it so much more likely (unless you're an auto industry historian) that you think of Henry Ford as the father of the modern automotive industry?

What makes the difference is that when Cugnot and Marcus and Otto were developing their important innovations, the other elements of the automotive industry just weren't there yet.

In contrast, Henry Ford found his industry gap, and it had nothing to do with engines or suspension or braking or any other automobile technology.

Whether you're setting your sights on shaking up your industry like Henry Ford, or your aspirations are more humble-say, just trying to make a lot of money-doing research on your industry and doing it right lays the groundwork for everything that follows. This research, which we call "doing your homework," helps in three ways.

• It helps you discover, define, or refine the vision that inspires you and the mission that motivates you;
• It helps you reach conclusions that define the boundaries and constraints for choosing your strategy and your operating philosophy;
• Finally, it can help define your investment priorities.

Fine. These sound like valuable goals. But what are the things you need to look at that will help you achieve them?

First, look at the developments that came before you and define the state of your industry today and the state of the other industries that support it. Ford saw scores of previous innovations that helped support the safe development and use of autos: improvements in roads, in tires, in engines, in steel.

Next, look for the openings in the dynamics of the industry. What should be happening that isn't yet? Ford saw that cars-despite all the innovations to date-were still the domain of elites or aficionados, not regular people.

Then, isolate the key economic and other levers in the industry that are required to exploit that opening. Ford recognized that reliability and cost were the key barriers and the key opportunities to reaching the mass market with automobiles.

Finally, focus all your energies, priorities and decisions on moving those levers. Ford became maniacally focused on cost and reliability and on everything needed to improve them. He made bets on scale and focused on standardization at the sacrifice of consumer choice. He focused on innovations like the conveyer belt, interchangeable parts, and mass marketing. And he delivered The Model T-the first mass produced, low cost/low price car.

Sounds like a tall order. Don't worry. Doing your own industry homework and drawing pointed observations that will inform your vision, mission, and strategy does not require you to take night school classes in economics or hire Paul Voelker or Alan Greenspan.

All you need are the few simple tools and methods outlined below.

The ABCs of Industry Opportunity

The most straightforward way of identifying the right industry challenges and opportunities or to verify those you're pursuing is to do a simple gap analysis. It will lay the groundwork for almost all the other strategic and tactical work you do. We've referred gap analysis in describing the best conditions for each play; now it's time to take a closer look at this valuable tool.

In the hundreds of companies and literally thousands of different situations we encounter, we follow a very simple three-part formula for doing a gap analysis.

The ABCs of Gap Analysis

We call this formula the ABCs. A represents the current situation, B represents the desired future, and C represents the gap you have to cross to get to that future. How you'll use this becomes clear quickly with an illustration; in this case it's from our familiar playing field, Microsoft.

This first step of the gap analysis is the A, or starting point-your current situation. In Microsoft's case in the early 1990s, the industry situation in question was what would come after the IBM PC. Back then, PCs were cheap but had significant limitations. They couldn't run big programs and they weren't easy to use.

This was frustrating for people in the computer industry. Especially when you considered the promise of the new Intel 386 chip that offered more memory, more performance, more multitasking, more programs running simultaneously, more everything. A better future was tantalizingly possible, but not yet there.

That's the next step: to define a desirable destination-a goal describing the position you want to reach. For this, we use the terminology devised by presentation expert Jerry Weissman, calling your desired destination "Point B" It's the answer to "There's gotta be a better way," an inspiring but still believable alternative for how the industry could operate.

By examining all the existing factors in the computer industry, Microsoft was able to pinpoint a spot on the map that no other company had yet chosen or been able to claim as their own: an inexpensive personal computer that would be as easy to use as a Mac. This point B was one where PCs would be so easy and accessible that in the future there would be "A Computer on Every Desktop and In Every Home."

The third step of your overall industry gap analysis is determining the C-the challenge that, if met, will allow you to bridge the gap you have identified. You have to understand the size and nature of the gap, and commit to crossing it.

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From Chapter Five: The Best-of-Both Play

Before 1989, the phrase Japanese luxury car was an oxymoron. The real choices were simple and extreme. On the one hand you could buy a very, very expensive luxury car from Europe-hand-crafted to near perfection, with no detail over looked, the result of a century of tradition. Or, on the other hand, you could buy an inexpensive, mass-produced, reliable, and fuel-efficient little car from Japan.

There was nothing wrong with either choice, but a vast gulf separated them. Everyone knew that never the twain would meet. That all changed thanks to Eiji Toyada, the chairman of Toyota, who saw the market differently.

Mr. Toyada was pleased to look at his business in 1983 and see that Toyota was selling Corollas, Tercels and other nice, reliable, small cars like hot cakes. But he also looked across that vast gulf between Toyota, Honda, other Japanese cars, and Mercedes, BMW and a host of other European luxury cars. He saw their tremendous margins. And he was not satisfied. Toyota had become too strong, too excellent an engineering company, and too successful a business, for him not to capture at least some of that high-end market.

So he called a top-level, top-secret meeting to plan how to create the first Japanese super luxury car, one with all the panache, performance, and fit and polish of the best that the Europeans were offering, combined with the reliability and value people had come to expect from Japan.

This was no easy task. They had to get it right. With the entry of Honda's Acura line in 1986 and Nissan's Infiniti shortly thereafter, the heat was on-and the ground was laid.

In 1989 the Lexus LS400 and ES250 hit the streets to much fanfare and admiration-supported by highly stylized branding, superb advertising, personalized service, and incredibly high-touch, low-pressure sales. By 1990, Lexus was raking in awards-including JD Powers Best Car Line and Motoring Press selection as Best Imported Car of the year. The awards kept rolling in and so did the sales. Within three years, in 1992, Lexus outpaced BMW and Mercedes-Benz to become the sales leader, number one among all luxury imports.

What seemed like the impossible has now become commonplace: the combined ideas of "Japanese" and "luxury" are now firmly established and totally natural in the car market. These days, as you may have noticed, all the players in this relatively new, highly attractive segment face off against each other continually in competition to establish or defend their dominance-using variations on the play we've labeled the Drag Race.

So it goes. That is the way of competition. The play that made so much sense originally and got you where you are makes a lot less sense once you're established there.

Of course, Lexus didn't get this extraordinary position overnight. And, of course, the original conditions had to be right for their run up the middle.

Just what were those conditions and how can you tell if you're facing similar ones in your market?

Indicated Conditions: When do You Run Up the Middle?

For one thing, there has to be a middle to run up through. Or at least, there has to be the possibility of creating one.

The middle represents a huge opportunity, but conditions really do have to be right for the play to have a chance of succeeding. To grab this juiciest of apples, it must be hanging low enough to reach, ripe enough to be worth eating, but well enough hidden that nobody has spotted it before. Where these conditions differ from the Stealth Play is that the gap has got to be big.

Where do you find this middle? Look to your playing field.

Finding that gap in the middle calls for a simple gap analysis (see Part II) for detailed tips on how to perform this in depth). The gap is the middle. Pretty simple really: The current situation involves the trade-off between two extremes. In the future, a combination of the best of these extremes could be made available. Something has to change to bring these two ends together, and you're just the folks to do it.

The playing field has to possess such a middle in all dimensions of the market landscape for you to be able to execute this Best of Both Play. Start by looking at the industry. Conditions need to be ripe at the highest level first.

Your industry has to be ready and ripe for change

Unlike the Stealth Play (where you bet on being able to continue finding small or moderate-sized gaps that you can fill peaceably), the Best of Both Play is all about finding and filling the one big gap that will really shake up the industry. But in order for you to be able to pull it off, a lot of things need to have already happened.

This play is all about change-change that may seem revolutionary, combining two ends of a trade-off that previously seemed impossible to combine. But in terms of the industry it affects, this play is actually evolutionary. As you'll see, it has to be. Otherwise such a combination would be impossible.

In order to combine two ends of an industry, look for situations where both ends have existed long =

enough for their contrast to be real and noticeable. Both ends of the trade-off have to be established and mature enough to be worth the effort to collapse them.

Take Lexus, for example: If the British and Germans hadn't developed the luxury category first, it would not have held much interest. Meanwhile, by the time that Eiji Toyada and his compatriots started dreaming of entering the luxury market, they had already put in decades of hard work to create and improve their position on the other end -moving the Japanese car beyond being just a cheap little import, to establish it as a reliable, economical, desirable alternative. Without the strong low-cost car on one end of the market, he wouldn't have dared enter the true luxury segment on the other.

Once these extremes and the trade-offs between the far points of the industry have been clarified, you face the job of figuring out how to fill the side of the trade-off that you don't already have a position in. You have to project the market into the future, beyond its current limitations. Companies that run the Best-of-Both Play are inspired by the chance to reinvigorate their market, and to reap the benefits.

Of course, it helps if there is some dynamic in the overall industry that's helping propel change-some fundamental shift that enables new things to happen in already established territory. Find that thread of forward momentum and underlying change. Grab on to it earlier and more firmly than anyone else and use it to pull yourself right up through the middle.

In his launching of the Lexus, Toyada-san followed a pattern in an industry that has seen variations of the Best-of-Both Play over and over again to segment and sub-segment its markets, allowing manufacturers the opportunity to sell more and more targeted vehicles both as replacements and as more specialized second or third family cars. The minivan, and then the whole progression of sports utility vehicles, from the originals to all their variants-the luxury SUV (Lexus, Mercedes, even Porsche), the compact SUV (the Toyota RAV4, Honda CR-V. Chevy Tracker, etc), the hybrid wagon-SUV (the Subaru Outback, Volvo XC90, Audi Allroad Crossover)-are all examples of Best-of-Both market segmentation and further subsegmentation. All are attempts to refine previous categories, increase penetration, and drive up margins by better targeting.

But these innovations didn't happen just because the manufacturers felt like doing some targeting, but because they were able to find the right combination of underlying conditions. Usually, long-term trends had to come together to favor all these variations. Otherwise we would still all still be choosing between Model Ts in black or in black. The Best-of-Both Play is all about being the first to recognize and exploit the trend. The whole point of this play is to break the mold. We've seen a few variations, but the vast majority of such change tends to focus on: change in process technology, change in regulatory environment, or some radical technology improvement.

Building model variation after model variation would seem to imply the opposite of the economies of scale generally needed to pay off all the long-term investment in R&D and capital equipment for manufacturing. But since the 1970s, manufacturing technology and methodology has gotten a lot more sophisticated. With massively improved supply chains, just-in-time production lines, standardized drive trains, and interchangeable parts, the "economic order quantity"-the minimum required number of a category's units sold to pay back the investment-has gotten smaller and smaller. This in turn has made variations off the same core components mor

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From Chapter Four: The Stealth Play

If you can't beat 'em... Join 'em or make sure to stay out of their way.

It can get downright discouraging when you find yourself confronting a competitor company that has everything going for them. Whether it's because they're ten times your size, or better positioned, or just the default incumbent, it's still a bummer when they just seem to keep holding on to their lead.

You try so hard, you know you have something really special. Why, oh why can't you win for a change? Well, nobody said business was going to be easy or fair. Don't get too depressed. Don't throw in the towel. When you see another drag racer pass you by or find a platform landing on your head, remember the loss of a single battle-or even a number of them-doesn't determine the outcome of the campaign. If you have enough fortitude, if you're nimble, truly determined, and you don't let foolish pride get in your way, you can accept your losses, climb into your tent, and take cover.

The Stealth Play is the one for just such situations. It's a play you turn to out of need rather than strength. It doesn't offer a speedy route to victory, and it's not as dramatic or heroic as the previous plays. When you're not in a position to win one of those, it's the Stealth Play to the rescue, one the most important to have in your repertoire. You can pull out Stealth and use it as an alternative to slipping into a Drag Race you don't want, or whenever you enter a market where you face tough opponents who have more clout than you. It will help you gain or regain your foothold. Then you can survive, thrive, and even find a way to come back and fight another day.

What Does Survival Look Like?

Survival does sound better than the alternative. But what does this play actually look like?

The Stealth Play is like a quarterback sneak. Rather than running a play where you try to outrace the other team to the goal line, or launch a brutal assault against their defenses, you find a way to slip through while they aren't noticing. Once into their backfield, you find a way to keep their attention diverted.

To switch metaphors for a moment, a cavalry charge may seem heroic, the gallant thing to do. But when facing an opponent too well armed or too securely ensconced behind their walls, it's suicide. There's not a lot of profit in self-destruction. The smarter course is to find other, safer ways to undermine their advantages, ways that won't draw too much attention to you.

So when you're not yet able to win a direct confrontation, you avoid it. If your opponent controls the central position, find another place to make inroads. If they are more popular than you, hitch your wagon to them. But you will always be on the lookout for their blind spots, for opportunities to fill the gaps they leave or to address the needs and desires they overlook. And whatever you do, you won't draw attention to your actions or allow them to feel threatened until you're good and ready for them.

This is the essence of the Stealth Play.

The story of Enterprise Rent-A-Car offers a very telling example of a company that found itself confronted by massive opponents. Rather than duke it out with the heavyweights, the company removed itself to more protected terrain. There it could safely watch the top dogs beat each to a pulp while it built a stronger and stronger business-only to reemerge as a head to head competitor and arguably the biggest in its class.

Enterprise was started back in 1957 by fighter pilot Jack Taylor as a small, local car-leasing company. Early on the company did very well because of local knowledge and good service. It eventually grew to become a national car rental business, offering, among other things, daily rentals to people whose cars were being repaired. It continued to grow nicely until, in the 1970s, it found itself embroiled in the airport car rental market, where a fierce battle raged between the big players like Avis and Hertz, with millions spent on national advertising and promotion.

The company took a step back and asked itself some tough questions. Were they ready to go "head to head to head" with the two biggest players in this market? Did they even want to? Was struggling to compete for the spot of third car in a very expensive version of what we label the Drag Race worth the trouble? Was something like "We try even harder" consistent with their strengths and their modus operandi? The answer in every case was no.

Enterprise looked back to its roots in local, hometown markets and decided to remove itself from the cutthroat playing field "at the edge of America's runways." Instead, it found plenty of remaining gaps in its own backyard. It continuously expanded its footprint in hometown locations that the big airport travelers neglected to address because they were too busy slugging out rates and location fees at airports.

Enterprise decided not to bother competing for your travel-related business. It left that bloody field completely to the "big boys." It focused on being your nearby source when you needed a temporary replacement. It enhanced its offering to include a "We'll pick you up" service, making its differentiation complete.

Under the cover of highly localized small rental agencies, Enterprise was able to build a very powerful alternative business model. And because they listened and were low to the ground, they found and filled one of the most boring gaps in the business. Boring, but one of the biggest.

Other than business travel, one of the major reasons for renting a car is as a temporary replacement after an accident. And who, in the end, is paying the bill? Insurance companies-making them huge potential customers.

The other major differentiation Enterprise came up with was based on the issue of, Who wants to have to find their way to the airport to pick up their rental after their car just got totaled? Hertz and Avis would like you to. Instead, with Enterprise's multiple in-city locations and its "We'll pick you up" service, the choice for the carless car owner was obvious. On top of this natural grass roots advantage, Enterprise also made sure that it built its business to target the insurers-who rent tons of cars every year and whose checks don't bounce.

The result? Enterprise now owns the vast majority of the insurance temporary replacement market. And they captured this share right under Hertz's and Avis' noses without ever having to Drag Race either one of them directly.

Lo and behold, after biding its time and sticking to its knitting for so long, Enterprise reemerged in the mid-1990s as a huge player, with over 500,000 vehicles, and over 5,000 locations. Now they were ready to start opening rental offices at airports again. Is another Drag Race about to begin? Wonder who's in the best position this time around.

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Who the heck are we?

John Zagula and Rich Tong have worked together for years trying to make marketing simpler and more effective. And more recently on helping new companies capture and keep the lead in their markets.

Rich Tong worked at Microsoft for 12 years, where - as VP of Marketing and Business Development for Microsoft Windows, Office and BackOffice - he lead the marketing pushes behind many of Microsoft's most successful businesses. Rich is a general partner and one of the founders at Ignition Partners, a venture capital firm. His area of focus there is on telecommunications, consumer and small business software. You can also find him ruminating on family, geeky things and world events

John Zagula spent eight years at Microsoft, where he developed the Microsoft Office brand and marketed the desktop and server application product lines. Before that he held several marketing roles at American Express. John is also a partner at Ignition and he invests in enterprise software and services as well as consumer and small business companies. His random thoughts can be found on Zagula.com

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The Marketing Geniuses at T-Mobile like it too!

"Incredibly insightful. The Marketing Playbook is a must have for all marketing led organizations. It offers straightforward tools and approaches applicable to any situation."

Scott S. Ballantyne, Vice President of Business Services Marketing, T-Mobile USA, Inc.

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What Bob Stearns, fellow VC and hi-tech veteran thinks...

"High tech marketing - hell, any marketing - frequently hovers in the clouds, about 40,000 ft. above real customers. At best, it's a costly effort, run by pretty smart people, whose effectiveness is difficult to gauge. In The Marketing Playbook, Zagula and Tong have built a solid staircase between marketing strategy and real customer-driven results: Strategy that is tangible, actionable, and measurable. This is marketing, not as fodder for consultants, but as fuel for sales. Better get a copy before your next board meeting... and before your competition does!"

Bob Stearns Founder and Managing Director, Sternhill Partners, former Chief Technical and Strategy Officer, Compaq Computer Corporation, as well as McKinsey & Co, Banyan Systems and Motorola

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World Leader in Application Testing and Management

The difference between champs and chumps is the ability to executive the right strategic marketing plays. The Marketing Playbook is a no-nonsense, insider's look at how to choose and execute the right marketing strategy for your company."

Christopher Lochhead, Chief Marketing Officer, Mercury Interactive Corporation

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October 20, 2004

Stan Richards

"What others have unnecessarily complicated, Zagula and Tong have made remarkably simple. Their background may be Microsoft, but their playbook is relevant to virtually every business category."

"Stan Richards":http://www.richards.com/default.asp?S=2215, Founder, The Richards Group, The leading independent advertising and branding agency with clients that include Comcast, Corona, The Home Depot, Sub-Zero and TV Guide

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Waggener Edstrom the #1 Hi-tech PR agency says...

"We live in a world of highly tested and refined messages. You often only get one chance to do it right and be successful. Any business person entering a market, launching a product or kicking off a campaign would be well advised to read and heed the Marketing Playbook. Use it to test drive your strategy, hone your message and come back to it to stay on track as the results come in."

Pam Edstrom, EVP Account and Agency Services, Waggener Edstrom, strategic advisor to Microsoft for the last 20 years

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The Premier Market Researcher Speaks...

"John and Rich have had ringside seats to the launch and development of some of the most powerful brands in the world, and they've packaged that experience into strategies that you can put into motion the moment you finish the book. Obviously, tech marketers can benefit from this team's insights, but any company looking for a simple, powerful marketing system will fine value here."

Ms. Christopher Ireland, Principal and CEO, Cheskin Consulting and Strategic Market Research

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The Academic View on the Playbook

"The Marketing Playbook is the "Best of Both" play between Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy and Adrian Slywotzky's Art of Profitability. Its' powerful metaphors and insightful strategy
tools make it a great addition to any business leader's arsenal."

Mohanbir Sawhney, McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology and Director of the Center for Research in Technology & Innovation the Kellogg School of Management

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From the guys who drag raced google...and won

"For start-ups and established businesses alike, the Five Plays provide a really powerful, yet easy to use, kick-start to your strategy and great, simple guidance for getting your message heard. It is just this kind of thinking that can help you take the lead in a competitive market like we did with the search market in China."

Robin Li, Co-Founder & CEO, Baidu, the search engine that drag raced so well against Google, that Google invested in them

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Marketing VP of Apple Likes the Book!

"The Marketing Playbook is a must read, practical guide for anyone looking to create a winning marketing strategy for their business. Tong and Zagula take the shroud off the marketing black box and reveal a handful of surprisingly simple, market-proven principles. I'd recommend this book to anyone looking to improve their odds in today's competitive marketplace."

Rob Schoeben, Vice President Applications Marketing, Apple Computer, Inc. (and former collegue)

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What Microsoft's Bob Herbold has to say

"The hardest part of marketing is the discipline required to figure out what, exactly, you are selling and how you should make the sale in the context of competition. Too many marketing folks want to quickly dispose of this step and get on to the creative part. The Marketing Playbook does a great job of reminding you of the importance of such up-front discipline and provides you simple, straight-forward steps to do it successfully."

Bob Herbold, EVP and Former COO of Microsoft; former Senior Vice President, Advertising and Information Services at Proctor and Gamble; and Managing Partner, The Herbold Group LLC

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Al Ries Accolades

"New ideas in marketing strategy are extremely rare. Rich Tong and John Zagula have come up with one with their system of battle-tested plays outlined in The Marketing Playbook. Marketing managers everywhere should open up their own playbooks and be prepared to start using some fascinating new ideas."

Al Ries, co-author, The Origin of Brands & The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

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Marketing Sherpa DC Was Fun...SF coming up November 18

Evelyn was asking, when we are in San Francisco, there is still space at the Sherpa event on November 18.

BTw thanks an amazing amount to Anne who runs the Marketing Sherpa. She does a great job and understands how