From The Marketing Playbook
by John Zagula and Richard Tong (336 pp)
Getting into the lead in the market place and staying there are challenges business leaders face daily and for the foreseeable future. As noted in the Blue Ocean Strategy (see blog below), those defining a market niche have a powerful advantage by virtue of the fact that they lead in the market because they created it. The more common scenario, however, is where organizations reside in a ‘Red Ocean’ scenario, where they must contend with other organizations that have products or services that in significant measure align with their own, and therein lies the challenge: differentiating your value and sustaining it.
In The Marketing Playbook: Five Battle-Tested Plays for Capturing and Keeping the Lead in Any Market , authors Zagula and Tong observe a number of classic marketing conditions and have boiled down five strategies for market success. They provide extensive examples and illustrative stories to exemplify the strategies in action, for example Microsoft vs. Oracle. The core of the book, of course, is the strategies themselves, which are:
by John Zagula and Richard Tong (336 pp)
Getting into the lead in the market place and staying there are challenges business leaders face daily and for the foreseeable future. As noted in the Blue Ocean Strategy (see blog below), those defining a market niche have a powerful advantage by virtue of the fact that they lead in the market because they created it. The more common scenario, however, is where organizations reside in a ‘Red Ocean’ scenario, where they must contend with other organizations that have products or services that in significant measure align with their own, and therein lies the challenge: differentiating your value and sustaining it.
In The Marketing Playbook: Five Battle-Tested Plays for Capturing and Keeping the Lead in Any Market , authors Zagula and Tong observe a number of classic marketing conditions and have boiled down five strategies for market success. They provide extensive examples and illustrative stories to exemplify the strategies in action, for example Microsoft vs. Oracle. The core of the book, of course, is the strategies themselves, which are:
- The Drag Race Play - This is the most fundamental marketing strategy: comparing your product to your closest competitor, and highlighting why yours is better. A classic case is where Microsoft chose a large industry trade show in the 1980’s to have a showdown with WordPerfect, the leading word processing software. Microsoft’s auto-correct and ability to build tables blew WordPerfect out of contention. The operative lesson here too is to choose the battle and the setting when a very clear advantage is perceived by the challenger.
- The Platform Play - In this strategy the initiator invites others to join their infrastructure, thereby offering the benefits of the platform and allowing the host organization to lead others in a market strategy. Amazon and Untied Way used this to establish their leadership in their markets. Amazon provided an easy-to-use online retail store with book sales as its core merchandising vehicle. Smaller retailers who wanted to sell online found this platform, with all its resources including customer reviews, to their advantage. Amazon benefited by pulling together this network of smaller sellers who needed Amazon as their conduit making Amazon the go-to source for all of these outlets. United Way offered a similar service for smaller charities, who in joining ‘the United Way Movement’ became partners instead of competitors, with United Way establishing the direction and model for this umbrella organization for a range of smaller charities.
- The Stealth Play - In this strategy an organization’s offerings are generally comparable, and attempting a head-to-head differentiation of value presents no perceived benefit. Instead, the marketing model is to find the soft spots in the market that represent opportunity and to do it quietly. In facing stiff completion from market leaders Hertz and Avis, Enterprise Rent-A-Car chose to expand their focus to the urban residential market. Instead of just airports and travelers — which is where Hertz and Avis had established their market dominance — Enterprise targeted people who needed cars for short periods of time, for example with car repairs. They also capitalized on offering new features such as a free pickup service. In doing so, Enterprise established a new niche market, where they were the market leaders (a Blue Ocean strategy). Wireless phone companies and local airlines have also benefited by targeting rural areas the larger competitors have neglected and have created profitable niches for themselves.
- The Best of Both Play - This strategy represents a hybrid of both the Stealth Play and Drag Race strategies to orchestrate the advantages of both. While a head-to-head competition may be in the offing, an organization would strengthen their existing benefits to customers to strengthen their brand identity and from that value proposition launch a new offering that directly challenges a player in another market. A primary example is Toyota. They dominated the small car market along with Honda and Nissan, yet targeted the premier niche occupied by Mercedes and BMW. They committed to the idea of a Japanese luxury car that could compete globally and mandated their design and manufacturing teams to create classy automotive concepts aligning to this goal. The result was Lexus. The market responded immediately adopting the quality cars as the traditional luxury car leader took years to regain lost market share.
- The High-Low Play - This strategy has requires a deft responsiveness to manage success with an ability to quickly perceive breaking trends in the market. The concept is a specialized play that targets product or service categories into high and low end. Marriott hotels attempted to challenge Sheraton hotels by promoting rooms in the mid-priced quality hotel room market. Sheraton, however, responded with offering new amenities such as free breakfast and late checkout while advertising rooms at Marriott’s competitive rate. Sheraton defended its premium brand space while expanding its market with more moderately priced rooms. In doing so, Sheraton blocked the competition and split their original market to their advantage, into a commanding new high-low tier set of hotel offerings.