New Comm Biz

This was cross posted on the WE Studio D Thinkers and Doers blog.

I know I said we should abandon military analogies in marketing but I was wrong. There are just too many cool examples. Here’s one we’ve been working on:

The traditional world of marketing and Media are under an attack. An insurgency has formed and the tides have turned in their favor. Corporations can not win this battle using the same old tactics.

Insurgents capitalize on societal problems, often called gaps; counter-insurgency addresses closing the gaps. When the gaps are wide, they create a sea of discontent, of which Mao wrote “the guerilla must swim in the people as the fish swims in the sea.”

An insurgency can not be fought traditionally because it is fought by and/or supported by the people.

[A] popular insurgency has an inherent advantage over any occupying force.

So long as the insurgency maintains popular support, it will retain all of its strategic advantages of mobility, invisibility, and legitimacy in its own eyes and the eyes of the people. So long as this is the situation, an insurgency essentially cannot be defeated by regular forces.

As long as armies have occupied hostel territories their have been insurgencies. And with very few exceptions, insurgencies eventually win.

There are three main tactics for fighting an insurgency:

Crushing Brute Force

This is the “Shack and Awe” approach. This is a bit of a gamble and really requires the acceptance that you will hurt (and kill) countless bystanders. This is the approach the RIAA has tried to take with file sharing.

Cut off Support

Lay siege and cut off all food, water or support. This is very hard to do. On one level I think this is what Murdock and the WSJ are trying to do. But locking yourself behind really high walls is the opposite of a siege. Hope he has lots of food and water.

Paramilitary Operations

This is the “fight fire with fire” approach. The only real way to beat an insurgency is to win back popular support. Paramilitary officers become Guerrilla’s.

It occurred to various commanders that soldiers trained to operate as guerrillas would have a strong sense of how to fight guerrillas.

They are fully trained intelligence officers with all the clandestine skills that come with that training. These officers often operate in remote locations behind enemy lines to carry out direct action

This is why I’m so passionate about the shifting capabilities of PR professionals. They use better intelligence, better tools but the same tactics. At WE Studio D we’ve been calling them Content Guerrilla’s and in a future post I’ll go into more detail about how we deploy them.

All of my quotes, which have been pulled from various Wikipedia pages, with notes and more can be found in my Insurgency Diigo list.

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