Marketing Warfare
Securing Victory in the Battlefield of the Consumer's Mind
by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Most marketers believe that a firm's primary goal is to identify and profitably satisfy customer needs. In Marketing Warfare, marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout argue that a strictly customer-oriented approach is wholly inadequate in today's hyper-competitive environment. To succeed in this climate, companies need to become much more competitor-oriented.

Ries and Trout liken marketing to a football game. If a team simply identifies the goal line and moves the ball towards it without regard for the competing team, they are highly unlikely to achieve their goal. To win, the team must focus on outwitting, outflanking and, ultimately, over-powering their opponents. According to the authors, the bottom line is that a direct parallel can be drawn between successful marketing and competitive sports like football — or even must-win life and death pursuits like war.

Al Ries and Jack Trout are two of the world's foremost marketing strategists. They have advised dozens of Fortune 500 companies over the years and are authors of the marketing classic, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

The Nature of Marketing Warfare

Traditional marketing revolves around the customer — understanding customer needs, conceptualizing products that fulfill those needs and communicating that conceptualization to the customer. In short, the business world has always believed that the customer is king. But in most cases, successful marketing campaigns revolve around targeting competitors — not customers.

For example, in today's exceptionally cluttered automobile market it wouldn't help DaimlerChrysler to invest in trying to better understand customer needs if that information is used to develop a fleet of cars that look and perform like those of General Motors or Ford. In a market where everyone spends millions understanding customers' needs, where does any company gain an edge over another?

Marketing Warfare asserts in no uncertain terms, that the future of marketing planning and strategy will revolve around successfully attacking competitors.

Characteristics of War

If marketing is war, it would serve us well to understand the characteristics of war. Ries and Trout suggest that a lot can be learned from studying our active history of war over the last 2500 years, including the strategies adopted and the outcomes achieved.

The two main characteristics of war that fly in the face of traditional marketing thinking are:

1. The principle of force.
2. The superiority of the defense.

The Principle of Force

There's a common belief that states: "it is easier to get to the top than to stay there." Ries and Trout strongly disagree, arguing that once at the top, a company can use the power of its position to take root.

All things being equal, the army with the larger number of troops has an advantage over smaller armies. Likewise, a larger company with a larger sales force will have a similar advantage and is most likely to become the leader in its market. This doesn't mean that smaller companies don't stand a chance — they simply must recognize the principle of force and attempt to win the battle by means of a superior strategy.

Most organizations and marketing managers blind themselves into believing that, even with a smaller sales force and lesser resources at hand, they can take on the market leader on the basis of "better people" and "better products." But Ries and Trout maintain that while it may be possible to assemble a small group of star performers, on a large scale it is almost impossible to maintain employee superiority. Also, once consumers believe that a product is number one, it is extremely difficult for another product, even if superior, to take over that position in the consumer's mind.

The key to winning the war is not found solely in recruiting superior employees or developing superior products. Rather, Ries and Trout argue that to win the battle, a non-leading firm must successfully execute a superior strategy.

The Superiority of the Defense

The second characteristic of war describes the advantages of a defensive position, i.e. an entrenched defense that is expecting an attack has an advantage that can only be overcome by an overwhelmingly larger attacker or a definitively superior strategy.

Ries and Trout, substantiate this assertion by noting that in the six decades from the 1920s to the 1980s, only 5 out of the 25 leading brands lost their position of leadership. That is, after having been under constant attack from some the most prominent names in the world today, most of the top brands retained their supremacy in their respective markets.

Warfare Strategies

If larger forces are hard to defeat and well-entrenched defenses cannot be easily pushed back, do non-leading companies stand a chance of securing, or even successfully challenging market leaders? Most definitely yes — and history bears testament to this — but they need to assess their position objectively and adopt the right strategies. Similarly, if market leaders are to maintain their pre-eminent position they must also have a solid strategy to stay on top.

Ries and Trout offer four strategies of marketing warfare. The right strategy for your company depends on its position in the market and its objectives.

1. Defensive Warfare – a strategic choice for market leaders that focuses on maintaining their position of leadership and pre-empting, or defending, attacks by competitors.
   
   
2. Offensive Warfare – this is the strategic choice for the number 2 or 3 brand in the market — companies with the resources to take on market leaders in a frontal attack.
   
   
3. Flanking Warfare – this is innovative warfare based on using unconventional means to successfully challenge well-entrenched players using among other things, the element of surprise. These firms are usually too small to sustain an offensive attack on larger companies and do best with an attack that avoids direct competition. This could include launching a product that is positioned differently from those of the larger firms.
   
   
4. Guerilla Warfare – is for smaller competitors and involves identifying a segment that is large enough to be interesting to the small company but not large enough to threaten the market leader or attract the attention of larger businesses.

Defensive Warfare

The three key principles of defensive warfare are:

1. Only the market leader should consider playing defense.
   More often than not, companies and managers delude themselves into believing that they are market leaders. They justify these beliefs on the basis of victories in particular geographies or they start believing their company's own motivational rhetoric. While it's important to motivate the troops, managers need to face the objective truth or face the consequences. Defensive warfare is only prudent for true category leaders.
   
   
2. The best defensive strategy is the courage to attack yourself.
   Market leaders must "attack" themselves by constantly improving their products, pricing, distribution, etc. This principle is based on the simple fact that a moving target is significantly harder to hit than a stationary one. As long as competitors spend most of their time and money trying to play catch-up, they can't plan and execute a successful attack on the leader's position.
   
   A perfect example of the application of this principle can be seen in Gillette's domination of the shaving products market. Throughout its history Gillette has innovated at a pace that their competition has been completely unable to keep up with. Even though this strategy at times meant that new products took market share away from existing Gillette products, this approach has worked incredibly well at helping them maintain their leadership position, owning 65% of the wet shaving market.
   
   
3. Strong competitive moves should always be blocked.
   Market leaders have an inherent advantage even if they don't pioneer new innovations. This advantage stems from their ability to block any competitive move even if by just copying them.
   
   Many leaders miss out on the opportunity to block competitive moves because they either don't believe that the move will amount to anything and decide to "wait and watch" or they let their egos get in the way. When Volkswagen introduced the original Beetle into the American market, it became the butt of many jokes, but ended up surprising everyone with its success. The automobile majors underestimated the potential of a small car and instead of blocking Volkswagen in this category, they watched in vain as Volkswagen first created and then began to dominate this new segment in the market.
   
   On the other hand, Johnson & Johnson successfully took complete control over the headache medicine market by blocking Datril, a product created by Bristol-Myers. Bristol-Myers planned an all out offensive on J&J's Tylenol on the basis of a lower price. But this huge offensive took a great deal of time and planning and not surprisingly, J&J got wind of it. While the nationwide advertising campaign was being planned by Bristol-Myers, J&J obliterated the offensive by simply dropping the price of Tylenol.

Offensive Warfare

Offensive Warfare is the strategy that should be employed by the number 2 or number 3 players in a market.

The three principles of offensive warfare are:

1. Gauge the strength of the leader's position.
   Most companies tend to look inwards while trying to chalk out marketing plans. They look at their own products, their distribution, their strengths, their weaknesses, etc. What a company planning an offensive needs to do is focus on the leader — the leader's products, the leader's strengths, etc.
   
   Similarly, while most marketing plans aim at increasing market share in general, what they need to focus on is taking market share from the leader.
   
   
2. Find a weakness in the leader's strength and attack it.
   Leaders, like everyone else, have weaknesses inherent in their businesses, management, etc. But these are not the weaknesses that Ries and Trout are referring to here. There are certain weaknesses that are a result of the leader's dominant position and it is these weaknesses that should be targeted.
   
   For example, an Avis ad stated — "Rent from Avis. The line at our counter is shorter." This was an attack at a weakness of Hertz that existed because of its position of leadership. Similarly, Burger King attacked McDonald's on its strength of standardization and quick service with the ad line: "Have it your way."
   
   Leaders usually find themselves in a position where they cannot react to these attacks on their strengths without undermining their position and this gives the competitor the foothold required. McDonald's could not alter or adapt its delivery mechanism because that was their unique selling position.
   
   
3. Launch the attack on as narrow a front as possible
   Trying to attack on a wide front, across an entire, or even multiple product lines will dilute the effect of the attack and drain resources without producing any significant impact.

Ries and Trout illustrate the application of these three principles by conceptualizing an attack on a powerhouse leader — The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) — which has a stranglehold on the business and financial news market.

The first step of the hypothetical offensive is analyzing the core strength of WSJ and then identifying the most vulnerable aspect in that strength. The WSJ is actually two newspapers in one — a business newspaper and a financial newspaper. Therein lies its weakness — it forces someone interested in business news to have to carry around and possibly even wade through a lot of unwanted financial news and data.

Attacking the entire paper would be foolish, so one of these two halves needs to be attacked. The name suggests that the WSJ is first a financial newspaper so it would make more sense to attack the business half of it. A business paper that emphasizes its focus by being named something like the "Business Times" would drive home the point and could be the core idea behind a good offensive attack on the WSJ.

Flanking Warfare

Most marketing managers are familiar with the concept of defensive and offensive warfare. Leaders defend and everyone else attacks. However, flanking warfare is a bold, innovative form of warfare — a form of warfare that utilizes surprise and skill to achieve the big, spectacular victory.

The principles of flanking warfare are:

1. A good flanking move must be made into an uncontested area.
   The product should be in a new category that does not compete directly with the leader and should be the first to target the segment
   
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2. Tactical surprise should be an important part of the plan.
   Surprise is important to prevent the market leader from using its enormous resources to ruin the move before it gains momentum. Most organizations tend to lose the advantage of surprise by doing too much research or test marketing. For example, Johnson & Johnson first learned of the impending launch of Datril while Bristol-Meyers was test marketing.
   
   
3. The pursuit is just as critical as the attack itself.
   Where most flanking attacks fail in their long-term objectives is that too many companies lose their focus after their initial gains or victory. They move their attention to other products that are not performing well rather than strengthening the position of their winners. For a flanking attack to have sustained success, companies must put their resources behind their winners and focus on solidifying their position before launching competing products.

Leader's can be flanked in many ways but the most common flanking tactics involve price and product. Budget flanked Hertz and Avis at the low end of the market and entrenched themselves in that position. There have also been high price flanking attacks — Michelob used a high price flanking attack in the beer market. Seven Up flanked both Coke and Pepsi with the "UnCola" campaign targeting the caffeine content of cola drinks.

Crucial to the long-term success of a flanking attack, is the ability to remain focused on the area captured and firmly entrenching the company's position in the segment. Volkswagen lead a very successful flanking attack with the Beetle but it failed by diluting its focus and launching a number of new cars across all segments of the automobile market in the hope of repeating its success. At one point in time Volkswagen had 67% of the imported car market in America. They now have less than 7% of that market. Thinking small made Volkswagen big. Thinking big made Volkswagen small again.

Guerilla Warfare

In the world of warfare, guerillas have won many battles by doing what they do best — remain small, focused, and very agile. The same tactics can and should be adopted by small players who lack the resources to launch all out attacks against the larger players. The three key principles of guerilla warfare are:

1. Find a segment of the market small enough to defend.
   With very limited resources, guerillas need to find a segment small enough to defend. It could be a geographical region or a product niche or a demographic minority. For example, Crain's Chicago Business was a geographic guerilla in national business publications (focusing on Chicago) while Inc. was a demographic guerilla in the same market focusing on the small business owner. The key is that the size of the segment should be small enough to be both defendable and not attractive enough for the larger players to focus on.
   
   
2. No matter how successful you become never act like a leader.
   A guerilla's key strength is agility. While it takes leaders a long time to get things done through the layers of organizational bureaucracy, a guerilla can implement and adapt quickly. Guerillas should never let success get to their heads and try to imitate leaders. Guerillas maintain a lean organization and take advantage of their small size.
   
   
3. Be prepared to bug out at a moment's notice
   Flexibility and agility needs to be used both ways — in getting in as well as in getting out of a market. Guerilla organizations should be able to get out of a market when they have to, such as when a market leader attacks them. Guerillas do not have the resources to defend a sustained assault by larger players and trying to do so is futile.

American Motors had significant success with the Jeep, a guerilla product that developed and occupied a niche in the automobile market that was too small for the large players to focus on. Where American Motors failed was in trying to emulate its success with the Jeep in other segments (for example, in the arena of large and small passenger cars), thus clashing with the leaders and subsequently losing the battle and the war (it was merged into Chrysler in 1987.)

One might wonder just how a company the size of American Motors can be considered a guerilla. However, what is important here is not so much the absolute size of a company but rather the size of the company relative to its market. American Motors might very well have been bigger than Gillette but it couldn't afford to behave like a leader because in the automobile market, with General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, and the likes to compete with, it was still a small, marginal player.

Conclusion

There are many interesting and useful commonalities between military strategy and marketing strategy. As in military warfare, the appropriate marketing warfare strategy depends first on an accurate assessment of the firm's position relative to its opponents. Once this is done, a defensive, offensive, flanking, or guerrilla strategy should be chosen to meet its objective.

Armed with the insights in Marketing Warfare, companies can identify the right strategy to take onto the field of battle, take aim and triumph over the competition.