October 20, 2004

Why This Book?

FIVE BATTLE TESTED PLAYS FOR CAPTURING AND KEEPING THE LEAD IN ANY MARKET

Every company needs to figure out the best way to beat the competition. What do you do if the other guy is already dominating the market? Should you challenge them head on or lie low for a while? Should you offer your customers high-end features or a low-end price? Or both?

During their years at Microsoft, John Zagula and Rich Tong answered such questions so effectively that they helped Microsoft Office and Windows grow from a 10 percent market share to 90 percent market share. As venture capitalists, Zagula and Tong have continued to test and perfect their system with hundreds of companies of all sizes and at all stages.

Now they're sharing their best ideas and methods in an easy-to-apply book that will be enormously helpful to maketers in every industry and leaders in every size company.

Just like a great sports coach with a well-designed playbook, managers who read this book will have the tools, tips, and tricks they need to leapfrog market research, craft a smart strategy, motivate their team, and start scoring major points against the opposition.

From Portfolio, publishers of Seth Godin, Sergio Zyman, Geoffrey Moore and many other best selling business authors.

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September 25, 2004

What's all this about an actual book?

That's right. Surprise, surprise, it's called The Marketing Playbook: Five Battle Tested Plays for Capturing and Keeping the Lead in Any Market. . You can order it now, just click here, or for group orders click here. . By John Zagula and Rich Tong . From a great publisher, Portfolio. . It's being well received by those who've seen and reviewed it (click here to see some "advance praise"). . For a summary of what the book is about, keep reading... This is how Amazon describes it: "Every company needs to figure out the best way to beat the competition. What do you do if the other guy is already dominating the market? Should you challenge them head on or lie low for a while? Should you offer customers high-end features or a low-end price? Or both? During their years at Microsoft, John Zagula and Richard Tong answered such questions so effectively that they helped Microsoft Office and Windows grow from a 10 percent to 90 percent market share. As venture capitalists, Zagula and Tong have continued to test and perfect their system with hundreds of companies of all sizes and at all stages. Now they’re sharing their best ideas and methods in an easy-to-apply book that will be enormously helpful to marketers in every industry and leaders in every size company. The Marketing Playbook explains the five basic strategies for a competitive market—The Drag Race Play, The Best of Both Play, The High-Low Play, The Platform Play, and The Stealth Play. It illustrates how each one works, how to pick the best one for a given situation, and then how to implement it effectively in the real world. Just like a great sports coach with a well-designed playbook, managers who read this book will have the tools, tips, and tricks they need to leapfrog market research, craft a smart strategy, motivate their team, and start scoring major points with customers and against the opposition." The Marketing Playbook is meant for regular business people and marketing people in just about any highly competitive industry. It is our attempt at capturing the simple, straight-forward system we've used to help take the mystery out of marketing strategy and tactics, to kick start the process and to keep it simple and keep it going toward your goal - the lead. That system and approach is what we tried to capture - along with lots of examples and simple tips, tricks and tools you can use - in the book. We can't wait to hear what you think of it.

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September 24, 2004

International Publishers

Some really great news. Even though the book isn't out until October 21, we have already signed two international publishers for foreign language versions.

For the China market, the publisher is Sunbright Publishing, Ltd., Taiwan's leading Chinese-language magazine and book publisher and a division of Taiwan's leading business magazine publisher "Business Weekly."

And for the Korean language version, the publisher will be the Sejong University Press, leading publisher of books in many topics and with great business authors like Phil Kotler (thanks Ike for your help).

The actual translations and printing will obviously take some time, but we think this is terrific. Stay tuned, more to come...

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June 13, 2004

So, who's publishing this book anyway?

We were astonished, amazed, stunned in disbelief. But after the smelling salts we realized we were in truly awe-inspiring company. Our book, The Marketing Playbook, is coming out this fall from Penguin Portfolio. We were even more astounded when we found out that Portfolio's founder and publisher, Adrian Zackheim also did books like Seth Godin's Purple Cow, Jim Collins' Good to Great, and Jason Jennings' Less is More. Wow. Pretty humbling.

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More great company

We continue to be humbled by the terrific company we are keeping with our publisher. Just announced, "Geoffrey Moore, author of four Wall Street Journal and Business Week bestsellers -- Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game, and Living on the Fault Line -- has signed with Adrian Zackheim at Portfolio." The book is called DARWIN AND THE DEMON: Enabling Innovation and Overcoming Inertia in Established Enterprises, and is scheduled for publication in late 2005. Very, very cool.

Posted by johnza at 08:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Cat's out of the bag. We wrote a book...

Christopher Ireland's recent Fresh Perspectives entry sure made us blush. She is one heck of a smart, cool person. And although her flattery is more than we deserve, her support is a real honor. And she's right, we did write a book - about marketing no less. More about that in a bit.

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