The consumer is not your enemy, so hold your fire

Scan down the index of almost any book on military strategy and the

index of almost any book on marketing and the overlap in vocabulary is

remarkable. Strategy itself, tactics, targeting, weapons, armoury,

campaign, aggressiveness, operation, concentration of forces: you’ll

find them all in both. Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart could as well be a

visiting professor of marketing.

It’s not, of course, surprising. Marketing is a fiercely competitive

business; there’s nothing more competitive than war; and wars have been

at it a lot longer. But wars are never confused about the identity of

their enemies; and marketing, it seems, sometimes is.

I’m not quite sure when I first heard the phrase about ’getting in under

the radar’, but it’s round quite a lot at the moment.

If this metaphor means anything, it must mean that marketing

professionals see their job a bit like this. There are regiments of

people out there with just one thing in common: they are not buying the

product and are therefore the enemy. They are being bombarded (note

’bombarded’) by tens of thousands of commercial messages every day

before breakfast and have learned how to dodge them. They have become

increasingly media-savvy and icon-literate and can therefore spot our

post-modern ironies at a hundred paces and will dismiss our new

compassionate positioning with a toss of the ponytail. So the only way

to win, the argument goes, is to devise new and devilishly cunning

weaponry that will outwit the target group’s defensive mechanism by

coming in under the radar. (It’s not entirely clear what this means -

but it sounds immensely skilful.)

If all this were true, we’d have to leave the business; but luckily, of

course, it isn’t. Because what this imagery does is to confuse the cause

with the enemy.

Wars are fought against enemies for causes. In the same way, marketing

wars are fought against competitive companies for consumer approval.

But much macho marketing sees not the competition but the consumer as

the enemy. The cause becomes the object of attack, in the way that

Vietnamese villages had first to be destroyed before they could be

liberated.

I don’t know whether marketing companies and their agencies in truth see

their potential users in this way or if they just talk like this to make

themselves feel manly. Identify your target; invest in an arsenal;

concentrate your fire-power, and nuke them into submission.

’All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must

seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are

near, we must make the enemy believe that we are far away; when far

away, we must make him believe we are near. Feign disorder, and crush

him.’

First articulated by Sun Tzu 2500 years ago, this remains pretty good

advice for Avis vs Hertz, Sainsbury’s vs Tesco, Reebok vs Nike.

But it’s a rotten way to schmooze a punter.

Jeremy Bullmore is a non-executive director of the Guardian Media Group

and WPP Group.

This article was first published on Marketing