Today I decided to talk with you about Jack Trout and his legendary book “Marketing Wars”. The book is not big, just 75 pages (a couple of hours of entertaining reading). After rereading the “Wars” by Trout and refreshing everything, I got the idea to write a short review.
So, John Frances “Jack” Trout is an American marketer, founder, and president of the consulting firm “Trout & Partners”. Trout is one of the authors of the marketing concepts of “positioning” and the marketing warfare theory.
Founded by Trout, “Trout & Partners”, headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, USA, is a marketing consultancy. It has representative offices in more than 30 countries of the world, including Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.
Why wars? In his book, Jack Trout draws a clear analogy between war and marketing. At the same time, he states that the basic principles of warfare are quite applicable in marketing. The Prussian general Karl Von Clausewitz wrote about these principles in his book “On War”. Perhaps they are both right, and marketing is indeed the battleground of competing companies for a place in the sun, based on the fundamental principles of marketing. The principles that Trout & Clausewitz describe in their books are cited below:
- The principle of power. It characterizes the power of the army (company). And who has more of this power, he will become the winner in the end. Neither the stardom of people nor the product will make a marketing strategy successful as some available resources.
- The superiority of defense. When a company defends itself and defends its conquered market share, it is more likely to win than an attacking company. An attack requires both resources and conditions. For defense, you only need desire.
- A competent calculation of actions will win any war. You can’t, guns blazing, jump into the pool with your feet at your competitor. Well-designed and calculated small pinches can do much more good.
- The battlefield is the brain. Marketing wars do not take place at points of sale, whether it is an office, a hypermarket, or a market tent. Marketing wars take place in the minds of yours and your customers. However, for this, you must clearly understand what positions your competitors occupy in the minds of your customers.
- You need to know exactly what kind of war you are fighting. There are several ways to conduct a marketing battle, and they depend on many factors. That is why you need to understand your capabilities in the market clearly, and how you will take various marketing steps.
“Marketing wars” are written in clear language and are quite accessible for understanding and analysis. The book will be interesting both to a professional marketer and to a usual person who is interested in the history of wars of the largest world corporations. Even though the “Wars” were written at the end of the last century and describe the realities of those times, the book is still relevant and is of interest to our contemporaries. I think the whole thing is that tactics and rules of warfare have been invented and used for more than one millennium. And now, having drawn analogies, marketers have adopted them and are using them on the battlefield among competitors.