The Marketing Playbook Five Battle-Tested Plays for Capturing and Keeping the Leadin 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 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 Playbookexplains 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.

John Zagula spent eight years at Microsoft, where he developed the Microsoft Office brand and marketed the desktop and server application product lines. Richard Tong worked at Microsoft for ten years, serving as VP of marketing and business development for Microsoft Windows, Office, and Back Office. Both are venture capitalists with Ignition Partners.

Introduction What do a rural telecom service provider, a fifty-person call center, a high-end computer manufacturer, a three-PhDs-in-a-garage start-up, the world?s largest software company, and you all have in common? Probably lots of things. But certainly one of the most surprising is that, for any given product and at any given time, each of them follows one of only five marketing strategies?or plays, as we like to call them?to win in their marketplace. Just five. Seriously. Consciously or unwittingly, rightly or wrongly selected, well or poorly executed, these plays have been and are being used by companies as diverse as those above, each placing its bet on one of only five strategy alternatives to gain or defend its position in its market. And that includes you, whether you know it or not. The Marketing Playbookhas been over seventeen tough years in the making. Even before we knew we were following an actual system that could be articulated, we were continuously testing, retesting, and refining this book?s methods, tools, and guidelines in the rigors of the real marketplace. The core concepts at the heart of this book were first forged in the furnace of Microsoft?s highly competitive market situations in the late 1980s and 1990s, when the two co-authors of this book were in the thick of the company?s crucial marketing efforts. Whether you?re facing large, entrenched competition, numerous smaller players, or an as yet undefined market landscape, finding the right path to market leadership is a hard thing to do. But across all these situations, through repeated trial and error, we found a common thread, a basic logic that lay behind all the moves that ultimately succeeded. It wasn?t until we were asked to share our methods and techniques to help train other marketing and business folks that it actually dawned on us we were following a discrete, focused system. When we sat down to plan out the lessons we wanted to share with other Microsoft businesspeople and reviewed all the strategies that we had in fact deployed across our various product launches, competitive battles, and customer targets, we were surprised to find that, no matter how hard we tried to come up with more, we discovered that in each case, one of only five basic approaches had provided the path to victory. And this was not because our imaginations were limited; it was because these five really covered all the situations we faced. These are the five plays, the heart of the Playbook system. The people with whom we shared these plays were struck by their clarity and simplicity, and how well they fit every type of situation. Many were seasoned marketing and business professionals, but time and time again, they consistently found the plays one of the easiest ways to understand and effectively guide their own plans. The five plays really seemed universally applicable. But maybe we were just biased by our experience; maybe these strategies would not apply beyond the scope of our current jobs. After all, very few companies have the market position or financial wherewithal of a Microsoft. And indeed, after we left Microsoft and started a venture capital firm, we found ourselves confronting a whole new set of challenges. The companies we worked with boasted fewer resources, had less-tested products than their rivals, and often faced competitors much larger than themselves. Further, they were under the gun, knowing that one significant misstep and they could easily go under. So there wasn?t a lot of room for error. These companies needed to find a simple, reliable way to map out an effective marketing strategy that fit their unique goals and means. And it turned out that no matter what the company, product, or challenge they faced, one of the five plays worked for them, too. All five are great plays. That said, it became clear that no matter what the play, if you?re running it o