gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

triangulated media

My blogging buddy, John Zagula just kindly mentioned me on his blog, Marketing Playbook, and then an hour later also kindly bought a blogad on gapingvoid. Thanks, John!

(I couldn't help noticing he borrowed one of my cartoons for the visual in the ad. Heh. Nice one.)

We've been having some great e-mail exchanges recently. He's an interesting guy. He and his colleague Richard have just come out with the book version of his blog, also called "Marketing Playbook".

I've been following his blog for a while. The making of the book is as much of the story as the actual marketing ideas expressed, so it's been fun watching the whole thing come together in the hopeful-but-haphazard way most books do. Here's the schpiel on Amazon:

Every company needs to figure out the best way to beat the competition. What do you do if the other guy is already dominating the market? Should you challenge them head on or lie low for a while? Should you offer customers high-end features or a low-end price? Or both?

During their years at Microsoft, John Zagula and Richard Tong answered such questions so effectively that they helped Microsoft Office and Windows grow from a 10 percent to 90 percent market share. As venture capitalists, Zagula and Tong have continued to test and perfect their system with hundreds of companies of all sizes and at all stages.

Now they’re sharing their best ideas and methods in an easy-to-apply book that will be enormously helpful to marketers in every industry and leaders in every size company.

The Marketing Playbook explains the five basic strategies for a competitive market—The Drag Race Play, The Best of Both Play, The High-Low Play, The Platform Play, and The Stealth Play. It illustrates how each one works, how to pick the best one for a given situation, and then how to implement it effectively in the real world.

Just like a great sports coach with a well-designed playbook, managers who read this book will have the tools, tips, and tricks they need to leapfrog market research, craft a smart strategy, motivate their team, and start scoring major points with customers and against the opposition.

"Playbook" is a fabulous metaphor. Not to mention it's easy to understand, especially for the guy in the bookstore who's never, ever stepped foot in a marketing department or MBA classroom, but still has a business to get off the ground.

Having read and enjoyed the book, I think it may actually do quite well. But it's not really about the book. And it's not really about the blog, either.

What's interesting to me is how the book and blog work together to form this "third thing" which I think is quite brilliant. "Triangulated Media"? Is that a term? Can I use it?

A marketing book whose main message is transmitted through the actual marketing of itself, rather than the actual content. Think about it.

It's not just that the medium becomes the message, it's that the message also becomes the medium, in some kind of deceptively simple, postmodern "Don't do as we say, do as we do" kind of way.

Fabulous.

Books are like companies. Their first and best function are as "Idea Amplifiers", not commerce mechanisms. That comes later.

From talking to John, I understand the book project was conceived not primarily as a commercial enterprise, but a way to "spread pollen" and start conversations with all sorts of people. No different than blogging.

Idea Amplication as primary function. John certainly gets this concept, so do I, so do a lot of the people we know, but percentage-wise very few people actually do. I really have no idea why. As I'm fond of saying, it's so frickin' obvious. Anybody?

Regardless, we live in interesting times. I raise my glass to both John and Richard, for being at the front end of it all.

Posted by hugh macleod at October 23, 2004 3:42 PM | TrackBack