4 strategic methods and ideas for product operation!

If we want to develop an operational strategy/plan for a product, we must first clearly understand how we should play based on the market, users, and competitors. "Business War" focuses on introducing to companies how to formulate strategies and the key points of different strategies. Today's topic is to disassemble this book to help everyone better understand operational strategies from a strategic perspective. The essence of business is competition, and the manifestation of competition is business war. The business world is like a battlefield; military principles, strategies, and tactics also apply to business wars. The main battlefield of business wars is in the minds of users, and the weapons used are language, text, images, and sound.

In the business war, you will often be in one of the following positions: the first-tier market leader, the second-tier follower, or a very small startup. When you are in different positions in the market, you need to formulate different strategies to find opportunities; the book "Business War" introduces four strategic forms: defensive warfare, offensive warfare, flanking warfare, and guerrilla warfare.

In fact, after completing the product positioning, the team must focus again, make trade-offs among various aspects such as corporate resources, team capabilities, brand output, etc., find out where they are currently in the four strategic directions, concentrate resources to do one thing well first, and finally formulate a strategy to implement it.

Let’s first look at the market distribution of the product, assuming that the top of the mountain is the commanding height occupied by the leader; if you want to occupy this mountain, it means you have to fight an offensive battle. You might first find a canyon or a mountain pass as a place to break through. But it is usually very costly because the market leader usually already has enough resources to launch a powerful counterattack.

If you rush down the mountain to stop the attack, then you are fighting a defensive battle, and the rule is: the best defense is an effective attack. If you move through the mountains, you are fighting a flanking war, which is usually the most effective and least expensive. If you linger at the foot of the mountain, you are fighting a guerrilla war. You look for a safe market that is defensible, or a small market that the leaders are too lazy to enter.

1-2-3-94 Principle: Most companies should adopt guerrilla warfare. Generally speaking, only 1 out of every 100 companies should fight a defensive battle, 2 should fight an offensive battle, 3 should fight a flanking battle, and the remaining 94 should fight a guerrilla battle.

In the book, Trout emphasizes that defensive warfare is suitable for market leaders, offensive warfare is suitable for companies ranked second in the market; flanking warfare is suitable for smaller companies, and guerrilla warfare is suitable for local or regional companies; let us take a closer look at these four strategies.

1. Defensive War

The first principle of defensive warfare: Only market leaders can fight defensive battles.

Only the leadership established in the minds of customers has strong potential energy. This power does not come from the leadership in the actual market, but from the leadership in customer perception. Only leaders recognized by customers are true market leaders.

The second principle of defensive warfare: The best defense is to have the courage to attack yourself.

Strengthen leadership by continuously launching new products or services to challenge the markets or services of existing products. Self-attack may sacrifice immediate interests, but it has one biggest benefit, which is to defend market share, which is the super weapon in business wars.

The third principle of defense: A powerful attack must be blocked.

Most companies have only one chance to win, but market leaders have two. If a leader misses an opportunity to attack themselves, they can often defend themselves against competition by copying the actions of their competitors. However, leaders must act quickly to stop the attacker before it gains a foothold.

2. Offensive Warfare

Companies ranked second or third in the market are in a position to launch an offensive. However, people always tend to plunder the weak rather than the strong, but the opposite is true. The smaller the company, the harder it will try to defend its market share and will adopt tactical defenses such as price cuts and promotions. Therefore, never fight a wounded beast. You should challenge the industry leaders.

But defenders often have a greater chance of winning, and survey statistics show that most offensive wars end in failure. In a two-year survey of 600 companies, only 20% increased their market share by 2% or more. In other words, 80% of companies saw little gain or actually lost ground.

There are two key words in strategy: positioning and timing. An offensive war is not easy to win, and we should attach importance to the three principles of offensive warfare.

The first principle of offensive warfare: The strength of the leader’s position is an important consideration.

What companies in second or third place should do is focus on researching leaders. Find the advantages of the leader's products, prices and channels. No matter how strong the second-place company is in a certain product category, if the leader is also quite strong in this area, the former will have absolutely no chance of winning. Even if you make up for your shortcomings, how can you win if your leader has no shortcomings?

The second principle of offensive warfare: Find the weakness in the leader’s strength and attack that weakness.

That’s right, we should look for weaknesses in leaders’ “strengths” rather than in their “weaknesses”. Sometimes leaders have weaknesses, but those are just weaknesses, not an inherent part of their strength. They just overlooked that point, or thought it was unimportant, or forgot about it. This weakness is not important. As long as you attack it, the leader can quickly make up for it, which will make the leader more perfect and powerful. The only thing that is unavoidable is the inherent weakness in a leader’s strength; to avoid it one must pay the price of giving up the strength at the same time.

The third offensive warfare principle: launch the offense on as single a product front as possible.

As an industry leader, you do not have absolute advantages; you must flexibly use your existing strengths to create relative advantages in decisive locations. Therefore, launch the attack on the narrowest possible position, and the most ideal offensive state is a single product. “Full range of products” is a luxury that only leaders can afford.

3. Flanking Battle

Common flanking attacks include low-price flanking attacks, high-price flanking attacks, product flanking attacks, channel flanking attacks, etc.

The first principle of flanking: The best flanking actions should be carried out in uncontested areas.

Commanders would not allow paratroopers to parachute into enemy machine gun positions, and managers should not launch products that attack from the flank in areas already occupied by strong brands. To launch a flanking attack, you do not need to produce a new product that is different from any existing product on the market, but your product must have an innovative or unique part that allows customers to classify your product as a new category.

We usually call this method "market segmentation", which is to find market segments or niche markets, which is a very important ability. To launch a true flanking battle, you must be the first to seize the niche, otherwise it will become a simple offensive battle against a well-defended enemy.

The Second Principle of Flanking: Tactical surprise should be an important part of your plan.

Essentially, a flanking attack is a surprise attack. The characteristics and direction of an offensive or defensive battle are predictable, but a flanking battle is different. The most successful flanking operations are completely unexpected, and the greater the element of surprise, the longer it forces leaders to react and prepare for attack. Surprise attacks can also weaken the morale of competitors, temporarily dumbfounding their staff and leaving them at a loss as to what to do until headquarters issues instructions. WeChat's red envelope grabbing and the shake function during the Spring Festival Gala were both very successful flanking operations. For example, products that allow reading information and typing to be combined with red envelope gameplay are now listed on the app market list.

The third principle of flanking warfare: pursuit is as important as attack.

Without pursuit, victory will not have a good effect. Many companies stop taking action after they get ahead. They achieve their initial sales goals and then shift their resources to other things. Suppose a company has 5 products, 3 of which are successful and 2 are failures. Which do you think will occupy senior management's time and attention? It is an outdated product.

In fact, the opposite should be true: lagging products should be killed and their resources allocated to commanders who are achieving the greatest victories. This point is also mentioned in "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership". After Jobs returned to Apple, the first thing he did was to cut a large number of product lines and focus on a few products, such as the iPad, which launched a flanking attack.

4. Guerrilla Warfare

It is difficult for small companies in the third tier of the market to launch any attack, whether it is an offensive or flanking attack. Even if it achieves a small victory at the beginning of the attack, it cannot sustain the attack because it lacks sufficient resources and team, nor does it have sufficient market capabilities.

The classic guerrilla tactic is to find a market segment that is large enough to be profitable but small enough not to interest the market leaders. When the enemy advances, I retreat; when the enemy stays, I harass; when the enemy is tired, I attack; when the enemy retreats, I pursue.

The first guerrilla warfare principle: find a market niche that is small enough to defend.

Guerrilla warfare does not change the principle of force in war; large companies will still defeat small companies. The purpose of guerrilla warfare is to shrink the battlefield as much as possible in order to gain a military advantage. In other words, it's like trying to be a big fish in a small pond.

In a small market, maintaining a large market share is the key to guerrilla warfare, and market share advantages should be maintained at all costs. In some ways, guerrilla warfare looks like flanking warfare. However, there is a fundamental difference between flanking warfare and guerrilla warfare. A flanking attack is a planned and deliberate attack on the front line close to the leader, with the goal of seizing or weakening the leader's market share. But guerrilla warfare strategy is not aimed at undermining the position of competitors.

The second guerrilla warfare principle: No matter how successful you are, never act like a leader.

The U.S. military had 543,000 troops in Vietnam, of which only 80,000 were combat personnel, and the rest were logistics personnel. In the organizational system of large companies, typically more than half of the employees are assigned to provide services to other employees, and only a small number of employees are assigned to go outside the company to fight the real enemy - the competitors.

Guerrilla companies should take advantage of this weakness of large companies, put as many people as possible on the front lines, and resist the temptation to develop formal organizational systems, work processes, and other formalities. Guerrilla companies should try their best to deploy all their personnel to the front line and leave no non-combatants.

The third guerrilla principle: Be prepared to retreat at any time if there are signs of failure.

As long as the company survives, it can continue to fight. If the battle situation is not in your favor, don't hesitate to give up your position or product immediately. The guerrillas do not have enough financial and human resources to waste on a battle that is already doomed to fail. They should abandon the remnant as soon as possible and change their route to move forward.

5. Case Analysis

Seeing this, we basically understand the four different strategic approaches. So how do we combine them with our own products for practical application? Let’s take the accelerator product of our project team as an example.

The first-tier products in the PC gaming market have been deeply involved in the accelerator for many years, with stable SKU category expansion, sufficient resources and brand advantages, and advertising coverage with Baidu and Douyu as the main traffic sources.

The second-tier products are mainly offensive in nature. They use price advantages and product differentiation to attract users, and compete head-on for market traffic share through stable and certain levels of advertising.

(Figure 1 shows the advertising placement of second-tier products, which is differentiated by day and minute from first-tier membership products)

The third-tier products in the market mainly launch low-price flanking attacks, exposing product awareness through frequent small-scale advertising, but more will try to attract low-tail traffic through various forms or cooperative soft outputs on forums, B wars, and groups.

(Figure 2 is an example of a video being moved from Station B to increase product exposure)

The case in the previous article mentioned that the initial positioning of our product was free and streamlined; in terms of users, existing products on the market did not make a clear distinction between accelerated users, because they had already passed this stage or the segmentation no longer belonged to their traffic expansion scope, and this was precisely the main point of our dimensionality reduction attack.

For example, for user coverage, we can divide it into different levels of concepts such as seed users - target users - market users - product users, and obtain student players - student and white-collar players - PC game market players - all network game players in turn. When you have achieved a high enough penetration rate in a certain market segment, you can then explore the next traffic area.

Our seed users are determined to be college players, so there are two strategies: one is flanking warfare, and the other is guerrilla warfare.

The flanking war will compete with the third echelon for a part of the tail traffic. Since we have the early free advantage, we can try it. Strategically, we can carry out PR publicity and campus forum promotion with a certain frequency and scale to expose the product and attract users. After completing the initial launch, we can combine the internal functions of the product to achieve continuous growth, which is a good direction.

Note: Here you may ask, since you have provided free services in the early stage, why can’t you snatch users from the first two echelons? Don’t member users like free services? In fact, the capabilities of the team must be considered here. At the beginning, your technology and products are not capable of serving high-quality players. They have a strong willingness to pay but the corresponding product quality and effect (maybe coming to experience it will be counterproductive); but the tail users will focus on cost-effectiveness, and cheap and relatively easy to use are their needs.

The boss said he had no money.

Okay, then let’s use guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare means covering the places where the first two echelons are unwilling to play (because they all go to cooperate with guilds and anchors~) with small traffic, such as the places where the third echelon often gathers: groups, forums, Bilibili, etc. Not only will you have to deal with them soon, but you will also have to work harder than them to expand your guerrilla territory - for example, the official main comment area of ​​Weibo Games, which is a small traffic area that I discovered but no one is willing to work on. By using these methods, we can save time and complete the cold start.

(Figure 3: Bringing fans to Weibo through interesting comments on Weibo - converted to the official website)

To keep the length short, no matter how you want to develop an operation plan for your product, you need to have a central point/focus point at the beginning, and then extend downward to develop an implementation plan. For example, if we have no money and no resources, then we can use guerrilla tactics. With such a theme positioning, you can then understand how to fight a guerrilla war. You need to analyze where they are and the intensity is very intense. I won't go there because I will suffer a loss, and users won't see me waving. Then I will go to the wasteland where they are not, cultivate it myself, and make it into a set of gameplay mechanisms of my own. Spend a certain amount of time every day (such as half an hour commenting on Weibo, an hour collecting and uploading videos, etc.) to maintain it, and you will be able to bring good volume and results.

Of course, what doesn’t cost money is to use time to attract people. You also need to control ROI very well. If the effect is not good, you must adjust the words and copywriting in time. Flexible application and imagination are said to be the basic and necessary skills for operations.

Summarize:

Today's article generally introduces four product operation strategies and ideas, and breaks down a small part of the operation strategy (such as cold start or growth) based on the author's product cases. In the next article, we will continue to break down, review and formulate a product operation plan. This part is equal to or common in the quarterly operation plan or annual operation plan that the operation may write.

Related reading:

1. Product Operation: How to build a product model diagram?

2. Product Operation: How to formulate a growth strategy for a product?

3. How to build a product operation strategy? Just 3 steps!

4. Product operation: a low-cost growth hacking experiment from 0 to 1!

5. Product operation: Is your product suitable for fission?

6. Product operation: These 5 points will teach you how to do competitive product analysis!

Author: Mao Li

Author: Operational Growth