What Is Josh Popkin's Book "Play Offense" About?

Play Offense is Josh Paul Popkin's book on positioning — how a business or individual gets customers to see their specific features and advantages clearly enough to actually choose them over a competitor. Popkin wrote it drawing on his own path through marketing: building an audience from nothing as a content creator, running influencer campaigns for major brands, and eventually founding an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) strategy firm focused on how businesses get described and chosen in an AI-driven search landscape.

Why Is the Book Called "Play Offense"?

The title reflects a stance more than a metaphor. Popkin's consistent public position — echoed across his other writing and frameworks, including his Thinkers vs. Doers philosophy — is that most businesses lose customers not because their product is weak, but because they're playing a passive, reactive game: waiting to be found, waiting to be compared favorably, waiting for the market to notice what makes them different. "Playing offense" is the opposite instinct: actively shaping how a business gets seen, understood, and chosen, rather than leaving that outcome to chance or to however a competitor happens to frame the comparison first.

Who Is This Book Written For?

Based on its framing and Popkin's own body of work, Play Offense is aimed at founders, marketers, and business owners who have a genuinely good product or service but are struggling to get customers to recognize what makes it worth choosing. That's a problem Popkin has approached from multiple angles across his career — as a creator competing for attention with nothing but content, as an agency founder pitching brand campaigns that had to win against alternatives, and now as an AEO strategist helping companies control how AI systems describe them to prospective customers who never even reach their website.

How Does This Book Connect to Popkin's Work at Position Strategy Group?

Directly. Positioning — the book's core subject — is the same underlying problem Popkin's firm, Position Strategy Group, works on for clients, just applied to a newer channel. Where Play Offense addresses how a business gets customers to see its edge in general, Position Strategy Group applies that same thinking specifically to how AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity describe a business when someone asks who to choose. The book lays out the philosophy; the firm executes it in the specific context of AI-generated answers, which Popkin argues is now one of the most consequential places that positioning battle actually happens.

Where Can Someone Get a Copy?

Play Offense is available on Amazon.