Quotes About Strategy

Elvis Presley's manager, Colonel Parker, made a deliberate attempt to restrict the number of appearances and records the King made. As a result, every time Elvis appeared, it was an event of enormous impact. (Elvis himself contributed to this strategy by overdosing early and severely dampening his future appearances. Likewise Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.)

To find a unique position, you must ignore conventional logic. Conventional logic says you find your concept inside yourself or inside the product. Not true. What you must do is look inside the prospect's mind.

Building your brand on quality is like building your house on sand. You can build quality into your product, but that has little to do with your success in the marketplace.

Most marketing mistakes stem from the assumption that you're fighting a product battle rooted in reality.

With a plethora of products in every category, how does a company use advertising to blast its way into the mind? The basic underlying marketing strategy has got to be "reposition the competition." Because there are so few creneaus to fill, a company must create one by repositioning the competitors that occupy the positions in the mind. In other words, to move a new idea or product into the mind, you must first move an old one out.

Traditional marketing is not focused on creating new categories. Traditional marketing is focused on creating new customers. Traditional marketing involves finding out what consumers want and then giving them what they want, better and cheaper than the competition.

In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word, positioning.

Never run advertising until the major publicity possibilities have been exploited.

Advertising can only maintain brands that have been created by publicity.

If "what is the size of the market?" is the first question your company asks itself, then you are taking the wrong road to success.

Aflac, the company that brought us the duck. In the year 2000, the company had a name recognition of 12 percent. Today it's 94 percent. And sales have gone up just as dramatically. Aflac sales in the American market went up 29 percent the first year after the duck arrived. And 28 percent the second year. And 18 percent the third year.

It's a conundrum. "Marketing is too important," said David Packard, cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, "to be left to the marketing people." On the other hand, marketing is too complicated to be left to management people who have little experience in marketing and who don't understand its principles.

But positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.

When you launch a new product, the first question to ask yourself is not 'How is this new product better than the competition?' but 'First what?' In other words, what category is this new product first in?

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks, circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.

It follows that there are two ways to increase your profitability: Either reduce your costs or increase your revenues. In the old economy, reducing your costs worked best. In the new economy, increasing your revenue works much, much better.

In all other construction disciplines, engineers plan a construction strategy that craftsmen execute. Engineers don't build bridges; ironworkers do. Only in software is the engineer tasked with actually building the product. Only in software is the ironworker tasked with determining how the product will be constructed. Only in software are these two tasks performed concurrently instead of sequentially. But companies that build software seem totally unaware of the anomaly.

What's more, the only available economic upside comes from making your product or service more desirable by improving its quality, and you can't do that by reducing the money you spend designing or programming

The key to solving the problem is interaction design before programming.

Investing money is the process of committing resources in a strategic way to accomplish a specific objective.

The first rule for escaping prison in the United States is always having someone more important than yourself to incriminate.

Bond believes we are his pawns. He thinks no-one observes his game. But I am No-One. I observe everything, and to play with Nemo is to play games with Destruction.

He plans to use every low-down technique he knows to loosen up the suspect, everything from good cop/bad cop to a four-pound bag of oranges that damage the internal organs but don't leave a mark upon the skin. Or, failing that, he'll Google him. Sure

Child, you know nothing about war. You think it's big and it's loud and it's good versus evil. It's not. War is a delicate thing: it requires precision. It requires timing.