Make war, make marketing

I can say marketing is something that I love, but war is a subject I idolize as something to be studied. War came first for me. I’ve been studying it since my teens and only go deeper and deeper.

After all these years reading and theorizing both subjects, it becomes quite clear for me that they’re absolutely correlated. War, just like marketing, passes through countless shifts until it reached its modern shape. And that will continue so on and so forth. The same happens for marketing. On a casual or structured way, the subject is constant development for “ages”.

Marketing and war are two competition-based competences. It looks for me that they are far more than only the “Marketing Warfare” coined by Al Ries and Jack Trout. The true marketers should treat marketing as a real battlefield, with a clear objective (to fight for the customer acquisition and loyalty) and to make use of the right means. And this is just a basic, romantic vision of mine. Wars (and marketing) are really more complicated than that. Apart from these similarities I managed to find some others:

• A marketer can fiercely combat, but “die” in the battlefield if his attention is not fully turned into the battlefield;
• Manpower is a decisive factor;
• Arrogance can bring disastrous results;
• Reckoning plays a major part;
• Creativity, resilience and perseverance should always be part of the mix;
• Logistic coordination should be carefully watched. Marketing and war require a large concentration of efforts towards moving people and equipment;
• A great deal of the success is based on the leadership. Hesitation, weakness or lack of confidence are frequently fatal;
• Like the armed forces, marketing shouldn’t be a democracy but a highly hierarchical system;
• War games (or marketing tests) are not only exercises. They can produce a lot of valuable lessons;
• Talking about lessons, the one who learns faster in the battlefield can thrive faster;

I wonder why Gareth Morgan in his Images of Organization book didn’t think about including such a metaphor system. That could be of some interest to lots of marketers (including me).