Marketing Strategies and Explainability

Marketing strategies

Now, we’ll turn our attention to the main market strategies and see some of the greatest of all time, or GOAT, examples for each strategy. A market strategy informs our go-to-market team’s efforts. Will we be going after customers that have too many options or not enough? Will we create a product that effectively works better or worse than our competitors? These seem like obvious questions when putting together a business plan, but once things get going for our company and we start getting some customers, suddenly, these decisions might not be as concrete as when the company was first formed.

One of our greatest lessons from the start-up world was about getting comfortable with asking questions that seemed so baked into the company mission and ethos that they seemed obvious. We’ve asked these questions reluctantly in previous experiences, but we don’t anymore. Companies can change their strategies if they’re tempted enough, but every change poses a potential risk to the company. Market strategy informs everything from how we build a product to how we sell it. A lack of clarity into these aspects of our market strategy could result in building a product that isn’t right. A lack of clarity in the communication and sale of a product could result in acquiring customers that aren’t right for the company.

The following chart from Wes Bush’s book Product Led Growth offers us a look at the four chambers of strategies companies can use in their growth strategies:

This chart shows us the strategy quadrant that delineates the various areas of a go-to-market strategy and highlights the key areas between the discrete differentiated, dominant, and disruptive strategies. Every company will need to decide what its go-to-market strategy will be because this will inform how it sells, how it markets its products, and the language it will ...