| Marketing Warfare & the 6 D’S | Advanced Marketing |

5/28/2010 |

Marketing Warfare
Every company starts the year with plans and aspirations for growth. Marketing often borrows strategic approaches from military field.
Many people object to the military metaphor for business, and that's exactly what managers needs to employ to market products successfully.
Managers can benefit from this approach by understanding the strategies of their business competitors, and how to formulate and execute successful marketing strategies against them.
Marketing is war. To success over the competition, it's not enough to target customers. They must take aim at their competitors and be prepared to defend their own territory from would-be attackers at all times. Marketing warfare gives managers the best tactics defensive, offensive, flanking, and guerrilla.
As we said before, a successful company is always ahead of its competitors. Thus, its marketing strategy must always be about beating the competitors. If so, then marketing can certainly be described as warfare.
Four strategies are applied to different types of markets and companies:
- Defensive strategy applies to a market leader.
- Offensive strategy applies to a strong challenger.
- Flanking strategy applies to a weaker challenger, and is the most effective in their view.
- Guerrilla strategy applies to a small company that wants to avoid being crushed by the bigger competitors.
Most Managers think their company is a leader or at least a strong challenger, so they choose the defensive or offensive strategies. In reality, there are very few companies that are leaders or strong challengers in any market. Therefore, too much marketing patriotism results in misdirected marketing campaigns that fail to achieve positive results.
Finally we can say that “Marketing Warfare" is easy to read, enjoyable, understandable and applicable to anything you do in marketing.