Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

Fallacy: Strategy Is King
Business once encouraged the view of strategy’s superiority to tactics by
throwing piles of money at it. Fifteen years ago, many with a Wharton MBA and
a lust for money and status tried to get into strategic planning. They’re still great
jobs if you can get them. But after Business Week in 1984 reviewed the history
of thirty-three major strategic plans, and found that nineteen had failed, the
exalted status of strategic planners was in trouble.
Many business textbooks reinforce this bias about strategy’s superiority. No
surprise. Professors write textbooks, and most professors think that working on
strategy sounds like a more dignified use of one’s gifts than toiling on tactics.
But in successful companies, tactics drive strategy as much or more than
strategy drives tactics. These companies do something and learn from it. It
changes their thinking. As Tom Cooper, the former COO of Access
Management, has observed, “Sometimes, the very first tactic you execute
changes your entire plan.”
For a vivid example of tactics shaping strategy, consider the Apple
Macintosh computer. The Macintosh was not the first iteration of the Macintosh
product; the Lisa was. Lisa bombed. But Lisa showed Apple what the market
really needed. Guy Kawasaki, Macintosh’s product manager, has admitted that
Macintosh evolved from an explicit strategy:
Ready, fire, aim.
Or, as Kawasaki expresses it, “Lead, take a shot, listen, respond, lead again.”

---

Tactics don’t complete a process; they continue to shape one. Tactics
sometimes are the end, the beginning, and the middle. Most important, tactics
play a critical role—often the critical role—in information gathering. By
contrast, you can’t learn from your strategy. It’s just sitting there pretending it
knows what it’s talking about, while your tactics are out there getting battle-
tested by the market.
I once advised a consultant who was vacillating among several reasonable
marketing tactics. I had a button printed with two words of advice for him: