• Title: Trout on Strategy
• Author: Jack Trout
• Publisher: McGraw Hill (2004)

Jack Trout is, without any doubt, one of modern Marketing’s reference points. Creator of the concept of “positioning” as a strategic Marketing element, he is the co-author, together with Al Ries, of two of the most important and innovative books of recent years: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, and Marketing Warfare, both of which have already been translated into 14 languages.

Trout himself is the author of what is already considered the "Marketing Bible": The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. After his well-known work, The New Positioning, which was translated into 16 languages, he has penned other best-sellers, which include Trout on Strategy, a work that we earnestly recommend.

This essential book explains how to successfully defend and position a company in what Trout calls “the tyranny of choice”, and how the Marketing Strategy of any company is vital to making its proposition stand out in the minds of consumers who are saturated by an excess of offers. Trout gives chilling examples in this work.

The tyranny of choice

One of the most enlightening aspects of this "tyranny of choice": an American supermarket has an average of 40,000 different units in stock to offer its customers. Keeping in mind that the average receipt of a typical American family is $150, 39,850 articles will inevitably be left behind.

What makes us choose one product over another? Again, Trout gives us a brilliant example of what accurate Marketing Strategies can achieve, and of the fundamental role positioning plays in them.