"Engaging stories, empirical analysis, and intelligent commentary make this an impressive book."--excerpt from book review in "Harvard Business Review, September 2001

"Engaging stories, empirical analysis, and intelligent commentary make this an impressive book."--"Harvard Business Review

Everybody knows that it's the market pioneers who have the best name recognition, the highest market share, and the most enduring market leadership....right? In order to test the truth of the perceived wisdom on being first to market, Gerard Tellis and Peter Golder carried out an in-depth historical analysis of various markets, as they evolved, over the past decade.

Among other things, they found that, not only does being first not guarantee anything, but that the current trend of staking everything on getting there first all too often leads companies to embrace a disastrous strategy of rushing to market with incomplete, inferior, and flawed products. With the help of numerous fascinating case histories chronicling the success and failures at industry giants, including Xerox, Gillette, Microsoft, Matsushita, and Intel, Tellis and Golder explore the ways in which being first to market is often more a curse than a blessing. They isolate the 5 key principles that ensure enduring market leadership--vision of the mass market, managerial persistence, relentless innovation, financial commitment, and asset leverage.