Zag

On my flight yesterday (and I am flying a bit much these days - 4 destinations, 8 flights, 24 hours in the air in this 2 week period), I read an awesome book on branding and strategy called "Zag - The #1 Strategy of high Performance Brands" by Marty Neumeier. I love marketing so always enjoy good books on the subject. The one thing that surprizes me is how many people do not understand the topic. And of course I love strategy.

One of the great analogies Marty uses is strategy to the game Rock, Scissors, paper. When companies are small they are like scissors - they cut small niches successfully. In time they grow and gain size and resource to become a rock and are able to break scissors. Then they grow even more and become paper and are able to cover the medium sized businesses like paper. And then a start up scissor company comes and cuts a niche from their business.

I like the analogy and have seen growth like this. When I started EMJ, I did small opportunities in small niches (EG French Character generators for computers). As our resources grew, we were able to do larger niches (like Apple and bar code) and as we grew even larger and combined with SYNNEX we were able to move to more mainstream products like HP, Microsoft, Lexmark etc. And I see small companies taking small pieces of business.

I am behind in posting my book reports. Need to post more often.