The Lightning Strike Strategy: How To Plan An Annual Marketing Strategy That Solidifies Your Leadership Position (Part I)

When looking at a new marketing plan, do NOT look at the idea through the “Do I like this?” lens. Look at it through the “Does this work?” lens.

Arrrrr! 🏴‍☠️ Welcome to a paid edition of Category Pirates. This foundational series shares category design principles, strategies, and actionable frameworks to help you design new and different categories. Thank you for reading. And of course, forward this mini-book to anyone who needs to hop aboard the Pirate ship.

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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

Most annual marketing planning is an orgy of frustration and mental masturbation.

(An image of a conference room—or, in today’s digital world, a bunch of Zoom boxes muting and unmuting—of executives tripping over each other, spurting out “creative ideas” and a long list of “P1 priorities” should come to mind.)

At best, a company will audit its metrics from the previous year and decide which initiatives to spend more money incrementally improving. At its worst, the CFO is the one coming up with the slogan that’s going to go on the billboards the company is planning to run for their next product launch. Either way, annual marketing planning is usually about as fun and productive as getting hit with a hockey puck in the privates.

The first problem with marketing plans is most of them start with last year’s marketing plan as the template.

But legendary plans are about creating a different future. Not continuing the past.

And as your shipmates, we are here to help you right the ship.

The 3 Pillars Of Every Great Marketing Strategy: Information Wars, Air Wars, and Ground Wars

To begin, it’s important we outline what a legendary marketing strategy looks like.

Every startup, company, and creator is fighting 3 different types of wars at the same time: the war for who frames the problem, names and claims the solution, and as a result owns the narrative (The Information Wars); the war for who is then able to most effectively “sell” that narrative at scale (The Air Wars); and the war for who can best convert new recruits to the war effort—prospect to prospect, customer to customer, consumer to consumer, and thus make the cash register sing. (The Ground Wars).

Here’s a quick summary of each:

Information Wars: This is what sets the strategic context. (Context is everything.) It’s the combination of ways in which you educate the world about the category you’re designing, AND, learning from your Superconsumers (and amplifying their voices) to accelerate your effectiveness both in the air and on the ground. (This is more focused on POV marketing / word of mouth than anything else.)

Air Wars: In many ways, marketing is “Sales at scale.” Air Wars are the high-level strategic marketing you do in service of the new and different category you are creating in the world, all the while positioning yourself as the leader. These efforts are more focused on demand creation.

Ground Wars: This is tactical marketing (often at the point-of-sale and heavily integrated with sales) that supports your strategic efforts marketing the category and driving near-term revenue. (Ca-Ching, Ca-Ching.) These efforts are more focused on demand capture and lead generation.

Now, let’s walk through what this looks like in action.

The Story of Malibu Mylk

Every once in a while, we Pirates hop aboard another pirate ship to lend a helping hand.

Malibu Mylk is a startup we have been working with to help create a new sub-category called “whole-plant organic flax milk.” Within the mega-category of “alternative milk” (basically anything that qualifies as milk but isn’t dairy), there is a sub-category with a strong tailwind called “plant-based milk.” However, not everyone jives with plant-based milk. Some people can’t drink certain types of alternative milks because they have a soy allergy, or a nut allergy. This was Brittany’s story, the founder of Malibu Mylk. When Brittany Fuisz was dealing with some health issues, she went to see a functional medicine doctor who told her she needed to eliminate dairy, nuts, gluten, and soy from her diet. 

The problem was, every “milk alternative” in the market had some sort of allergen. Soy milk is made from soybeans. Almond milk is made from nuts. Oat milk is made from grains (the vast majority of which contain some form of gluten). For someone going 100% allergen free, there were no “alternative milk” options.

So, Brittany created one—out of flax.

The Information War: Educating customers on the benefits of whole-plant organic flax.

The first war Malibu Mylk has to fight is educating people on why they should consider flax milk as a viable “milk alternative.”

Remember, The Information War is all about three things: your unique POV (what are you saying?), your Languaging (how are you saying it?), and your Superconsumers (who do you want repeating what you’re saying?). In Malibu Mylk’s case, this meant helping design new language to talk about this new type of product. 

Some of what we came up with:

• “Whole-plant” as distinct from “plant-based.” Many foods that aren’t actually healthy for you (and are filled with other unhealthy ingredients) can call themselves “plant-based,” so using old language to describe a new & different thing would be a mistake. Too many “plant-based milks” strain out the majority of the plant and then add in a lot of non-plant baddies (like rapeseed oil) that many would be surprised to find out about. Actually, most “plant-based milks” are kind of like how some movies “based on real events” end up being marginally based on the truth.

• 100% allergen free. Flax, in and of itself, isn’t what the customer cares about. What makes flax interesting is that, in the context of (mega-category) “alternative milks” and (sub-category) “plant-based milks,” flax milk is the only one that is 100% allergen free. This is the *position* the product then owns in the customers mind.

• The benefits of flax. Once the customer understands that position, it’s also great to tell them flax is the largest source of vegan omega-3s, aids in digestion, is anti-inflammatory, and also sustainable for the environment (whereas it takes over 20 gallons of water to produce a single glass of almond milk).

The Information War for Malibu Mylk is all about (in this order) getting this POV, and these words, into the mouths of Superconsumers of health, wellness, and “alternative milks.”

But wait, there’s more!

Pirate Eddie (the genius he is) then discovered something interesting. Within the niche of health, wellness, and “alt milk” Superconsumers is actually an even more specific, more potent niche of more relevant Supers for this particular product. (We can’t tell you who though because that’s the *secret sauce* that’s worth $5 million bucks.)

These Superconsumers are not just of “health” in general, but their health in a more specific context. Which just so happens to be Brittany’s story as well. (This is a great example of Founder/Category alignment—the right person, solving the right problem, with a highly relevant personal story and perspective.) This is the level of nuance you should be thinking about within your own marketing. And why it’s so crucial to have clarity around your unique POV (Pirate Christopher’s specialty), new words that communicate your different POV (Pirate Cole’s specialty), and a data-driven understanding of who your Superconsumers are (Pirate Eddie’s specialty).

See why they call us the Category Pirates?

The Air Wars for Malibu Mylk are then all about getting relevant media, influencers, and of course their Superconsumers to talk about this different POV at scale—and for the company to publish content and launch campaigns that educate other Supers on this different POV at scale. 

The Ground Wars for Malibu Mylk mean Brittany interacting with relevant Superconsumers herself, or empowering her sales team to interact with and educate Supers directly. For example, something Brittany does when she goes to the grocery store is she walks around and looks for women who put almond, oat, or soy milk in their carts, stops them, introduces herself, and offers them the opportunity to give flax milk a try. This is hand-to-hand “combat”, and ground war marketing at its finest. This is a Dam The Demand strategy IRL (“in real life,” for all our Boomer Pirates out there). Malibu Mylk then does the same thing in the digital world at the point of purchase. When someone searches for Oat Milk online, they are likely to see an ad for Malibu Mylk’s flax milk.

The key is to align all three. 

The mix matters. 

When a company over-rotates and disproportionately spends more marketing dollars and people hours in any one of these areas, they usually run into a problem. Either they spend too much time and money or both trying to “sell at scale” (Air Wars), not realizing they don’t have boots on the ground (Ground Wars) to effectively convert those prospects into customers. Or they become too myopic and focused on winning each individual battle (Ground Wars) that they forget what cause they’re fighting for in the first place (Information War).

Where marketing planning goes wrong:

Unfortunately, some companies are extremely myopic.

All they do is ground wars. 

Pirate Christopher was once in a meeting with a public tech company CEO who said, “We make shit, we sell shit, and everything else is bullshit.”

For these companies, there is very little discussion around The Information War. Agenda item, “Debate the premise,” doesn’t exist. Everyone in the room just sort of accepts the premise, accepts that the POV for the company is fine, has always been fine, and will go on being fine, and all they need to do is figure out whether to spend more money on Facebook ads or Instagram ads and debate the tagline of the new product being launched in March.

This is what makes marketing planning so “fun” (aka: horribly unproductive).

Everyone thinks they are a marketing expert. 

People with no training or experience in finance rarely render their opinion about how to do accounting. People with no training or experience in product development rarely render their opinion about how to make products. But people with no training or experience in marketing almost always express their opinion about how to do marketing. We’ve been in more meetings than we can remember where non-marketing executives fought vigorously for their “idea.” (We once knew a CTO who wanted the company’s new enterprise software category to be called a “Thing Tracker.”)

When you are a CMO, you are constantly being given a lot of “help.”

And the reason marketing leaders get so much “help” is because everyone experiences marketing all day, every day. So in their minds, they are experts. Because they are consumers of marketing. (We know what great food tastes like, but we don’t think that makes us great chefs.) 

People tend to treat marketing just like any other form of content. They apply the same lens to marketing that they apply to a movie, a book, or naming their cat: “Do I like it?” For example, we were once in a meeting where a CMO was proposing a new color pallet for the company brand, which included orange. The second the CEO saw the new colors, he grizzled, “ORANGE!? Don’t you know that ORANGE makes people angry!?” We were not (and still are not) aware of any data science that shows this, but we sure know orange makes one guy angry!

The “do I like it” lens is for fools. Yet, it is the lens most used when evaluating marketing. But the right lens is, “Does this work?” And by “work” we mean, “Does this marketing help us design and dominate a giant category that matters?” That’s the lens to evaluate marketing plans, campaigns, and executions—and just like a great CFO in respect to accounting, very few people are trained, experienced, and qualified to effectively answer that question for an organization.

So, when looking at a new marketing plan, do NOT look at the idea through the “Do I like this?” lens. 

Look at it through the “Does this work?” lens.

As a founder, CEO, or CMO, we encourage you to use all of this 👆 as the context at the start of any marketing planning session. 

Unfortunately, most founders, CEOs, and CMOs will ignore this advice entirely. And will go on debating whether or not the company should make a TikTok page.

However, if you hear what we’re saying and are thinking, “You know what? These guys might be onto something,” then we encourage you to invest a third of your resources and budget into each area of marketing: winning The Information War, Air Wars, and Ground Wars. Test and tweak over the quarters. And also understand that it takes 6-10 years to create a category and have it tip at scale. So if the whole world doesn’t immediately understand the value of your new and different product, service, or idea in the first 30 days, don’t get discouraged. (Sun Microsystems became the server platform Category King back in the dot-com era by proclaiming, “The Network Is The Computer.” It took a while for people to “get” their POV. But when they did, people understood the genius of it.) 

Until then, you can still drive sales and generate revenue NOW by meeting customers where they currently are and using a Dam The Demand strategy. 

When targeted at your Supers with the right Languaging, you can start creating revenue fast.

So, to recap:

• The Information War: What you’re saying (POV), how (Languaging), to whom (your Superconsumers).

• The Air Wars: How you are taking your unique and differentiated POV & Languaging and educating your Superconsumers at scale.

• The Ground Wars: How you are empowering yourself, your team, and your Superconsumers to educate and enlist other potential Superconsumers to BUY NOW and become loyal supporters of your new and different category over time.

This is your marketing strategy. Always and forever.

All that said, sequencing matters.

So let’s break down one.

1. Information Wars