Trout - Jack Trout on Strategy

TROUT ON
STRATEGY

TROUT ON
STRATEGY

CAPTURING MINDSHARE,
CONQUERING MARKETS

JACK TROUT

Copyright 2004 by Jack Trout. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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DOI: 10.1036/0071447288

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To my wife, who had
to live with me while I wrote
all my books

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

I ts been a long journey.

Starting at General Electric and winding through hundreds of companies in the United States and all over the globe, Ive had the rare opportunity to understand what makes up success or failure in business.

These observations have been carefully catalogued and presented in 10 books and endless lectures to thousands of business people in every corner of the world.

What Ive learned over and over again is that success isnt about having the right people, the right attitude, the right tools, the right role models, or the right organization. They all help, but they dont put you over the top.

Its all about having the right strategy .

Thats because strategy sets the competitive direction, strategy dictates product planning, strategy tells you how to communicate internally and externally, strategy tells you on what to focus.

Thats why it is so important to understand what strategy is all about. The better you understand strategy, the better youll be able to select the right strategy for success. And, conversely, the better youll be able to avoid the big trouble its easy to encounter in our era of killer competition.

There has been no shortage of advice on this subject. In the past 30 years there have been 21,955 books written about strategic planning and marketing. One author will talk about sustainable competitive advantage. Another will announce that this idea is on its way out. One author talks about the importance of case studies. Another says that case studies shouldnt decide your strategy. And of course there is no end to jargon, such as dynamic advantage, conjoint analysis, competitive dynamics, coevolution, and my favorite, sustainable competitive disadvantage . All of this generates nothing but confusion.

But what makes things far worse is the fact that there are those who would say that strategy is one thing and marketing is another. But the truth is that they must be combined if you are to be successful. Marketing is what drives a business. And a great business strategy without proper marketing will often fail in a highly competitive world. To better understand this, consider the following example: