Going By The Book

Ries and Trout take their own advice.

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Al Ries and Jack Trout run Trout & Ries Inc., a New York City advertising agency with 50 employees and about $30 million in annual billings. On Madison Avenue, that's small time. How to compete with the J. Walter Thompsons of the world?

"The direct approach is to emphasize the one thing the big guys are always weak on -- creativity," says Ries. "That's what the hot agencies like Scali, McCabe, Sloves Inc. have done, and it works. But we're trying to flank them rather than hit them head on."

In other words, they're taking their own advice as laid out in the book Marketing Warfare (see "Guerrilla Marketing," page 22). If you're too small to take on a market leader, mount a flank attack: find an uncontested area and pour in everything you've got. To Ries, the uncontested area is midway between ad agency and strategic consulting firm. What he and Trout offer isn't so much an ad campaign -- though they'll do that too -- as an assessment of where a client fits in the marketplace and how the company can position itself vis-a-vis its competitors.

That approach hasn't won them a lot of friends in the industry. "We're voices crying in the wilderness," laughs Trout; and one trade journalist sniffs, "All they do is that marketing warfare stuff." But Ries and Trout have poured it on, offering their philosophizing in speeches, pamphlets, articles, seminars, videotapes, an agency newsletter, and books like Marketing Warfare, in its eighth printing. "We don't have much influence on the advertising industry," says Trout, "but marketers are listening to us."