The Marketing Playbook: Five Battle-Tested Plays for Capturing and Keeping the Lead in Any Market

This engaging primer contends that all marketing campaigns can be boiled down to five basic strategies, a typology distilled from the authors' experience as marketing executives at Microsoft and as venture capitalists. The""plays,"" schematized with football diagrams, are: the""drag race,"" in which your product squares off against a single competitor in an attention-getting battle for market dominance; the""platform play"" (Microsoft's forte), in which your product becomes the essential infrastructure for an entire industry (a la Windows); the""stealth play,"" in which you go after markets ignored by larger competitors; the""best of both"" play, in which your breakthrough product becomes all things to all men; and the""high-low"" play, in which you pit both your deluxe high-end product line and your cheapo down-market line against a rival's mediocre compromise offering. This illuminating conceptual framework is perhaps less important than the authors' lucid analyses of real-world marketing situations, drawn from case studies and from their own gaffes and triumphs in marketing Excel, MS Office and other software milestones in Microsoft's march to monopoly. They throw in lots of practical tips on market research, managing a marketing team, finding the proper rhetorical formulas to use in a marketing brief and writing mesmerizing ad slogans that incorporate""the rule of paradox""--i.e. buy this and you can have your cake and eat it too. The authors' wealth of insights, presented in a breezy, down-to-earth style free of management-theory cant, will give marketing managers much useful food for thought.