When marketers have a clear focus on the true task confronting them and are effective at it, then competition becomes a nonissue. What is the true task that alleviates the need for competition? Thinking about thinking is the process that challenges how we think about marketing and competition. The ideas presented in Marketing Strategy in Play: Questioning to Create Difference explain marketing thinking, how to cultivate it, and, ultimately, the ways in which marketplace differences are created. Instead of offering marketing steps, processes, and models, the focus here is on developing the practitioner’s thinking rather than providing some formulaic series of steps, processes, and models based on someone else’s thinking. This provocative perspective requires a deeper reading and thinking about many of the familiar notions found in marketing. For example, why compete? The book is written for serious practitioners interested in breaking from the familiar ways of doing things and in unique approaches to stimulating their own thinking effectively for any organization large or small.

What will the reader take away from Marketing Strategy in Play: Questioning to Create Difference? Fundamentally, the book examines difference and how marketing differences are created; as such, difference is explored at a level deep enough to understand its nature and how to be more effective at the process of difference creation that can benefit an organization. Second, it explains that marketing thinking is predicated upon a type of questioning from which marketing differences (e.g., answers) originate. Third, marketing is redefined as a way of thinking rather than a discipline or function. Fourth, the relationships among thinking, questioning, curiosity, and difference are revealed for the purpose of developing ways in which the marketer can become more effective at the game of marketing. Fifth, there are many new and different notions offered in the book that can be understood and used by practitioners pertaining to their own situations. Finally, questioning techniques are discussed for strategy development purposes.