Interview with John Zagula of Marketing Playbook

The Marketing Playbook is one blog that I keep coming back to - probably since its launch last year. It offers a good mixture of interesting, marketing-related articles but there's more to the blog as the Marketing Playbook is also a widely read marketing book – both are written by two very successful and very readable, marketing guys: John Zagula and Richard Tong. Here is an overview of the book (in their words):

"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 your customers high-end features or a low-end price? Or both?

During their years at Microsoft, John Zagula and Rich Tong answered such questions so effectively that they helped Microsoft Office and Windows grow from a 10 percent market share 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"

Their blog is a great example of how blogs can evolve: initially, it was used as a brilliant PR tool – giving people details on the book, John and Richard’s signings, interviews and even information on the book’s ranking on Amazon; whereas now it discusses a multitude of business issues.

I was so interested to see how the closely linked the blog and the book were, that last month I emailed John Zagula and invited him to take part in a question-and-answer session for Marketing Tom. John kindly agreed and I think that people will find his answers very illuminating and educative. Let me know what you think.

How did you get the idea of building a blog?
From people much smarter than me. Being a blogger started before we wrote the book.  I was turned on to blogging by my colleague and co-author Rich Tong and colleague John Ludwig.  They both have very cool blogs in their own rights The Ludwigs and Tong Family They also created a blog called Geek Fishing .  This is an informal site for the people in our company, Ignition Partners,to share interesting technical things they are finding out about.  The name of that blog came about because another colleague Adrian Smith built his own wireless web camera to check his crab pots from the shore.

My first blog was actually just an ongoing pile of stuff that interests me www.zagula.com It was only after we discovered not only that we were getting addicted to blogs as sources for our info but also that all of a sudden we had become recognized web authorities on topics like bike sprockets and the obscure German designers that we thought maybe we ought to use a blog in concert with our upcoming book.

Did you start a blog basically to promote the book or was there some other reason? Marketingplaybook.com was definitely started in concert with our book of the same title.  We started it though even before we had finished editing the book.  It was a great way to put down an outline of our basic concepts – the 5 plays, the ABCs of the playing field, and the XYZs of positioning, etc - and then to start tracking how current events related to these. 

One of the most fun things to do was to watch the plays that companies in all kinds of industries were running now and how they were running them. Since then the thing has taken on a life of its own. Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void had a great way of describing this whole process – that the book itself was just the beginning. That all products are conversations. And this was of course true with the book.  One of our fundamental goals is that the whole idea of a marketing playbook is that it is YOURS and that you use the basic principles to build your own playbook for your own playing field. Well, Hugh saw this as:

"a marketing book whose main message is transmitted through the actual marketing of itself… It's not just that the medium becomes the message, it's that the message also becomes the medium… 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."

How powerful a tool has the blog been in helping to spread word of the book?
Terrifically helpful. It is really cool to see blog entries from places like Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and China talking about the book and its concepts.  Clearly it is a super simple way to give folks a summary of the ideas in the book and keep them up to date on what we are doing, thinking about, and what folks are saying about the book. And it has been great to see all the interesting marketing blogs out there share their opinions. Oh yeah, and it doesn't hurt that having a blog helps lift your rank in search engines either.

I will offer another of instalments of John's answers in the next few days.

Read Part 2 of the Interview with John Zagula