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Asymmetric MarketingSM: Winning in the New Uncertainty
Joseph E. Bentzel, Founder
Asymmetri Inc.
“In years to come, there will be people who stayed pacifist or ignorant or oblivious to what has happened, and they will be looked upon in later history as cowards or dreamers or fools. And then there will be the people who saw September 11 for what it was, a declaration of war against us, and acted accordingly. I want nothing more than to be in the latter camp, if only because yesterday was and always will be September 11 until our enemies are vanquished.”
James J. Cramer, ‘The Making of a Hawk’, TheStreet.com, September 9, 2002
Question. Did you manage to find the time to tune into the ‘embedded reporter’ news coverage from Operation Iraqi Freedom? Of course you did. And did you see that American precision guided JDAM weapon take out a piece of Iraqi Republican Guard armor parked underneath a key bridge while leaving the bridge miraculously intact? Clearly, ‘vanquishing’ in a post 9.11 world, to borrow James Cramer’s word, has a lot to do with the power and precision of American high technology and the overall business health of the American high technology industry.
Let me get my ‘bias’ out up front. American citizens and the free world need an American high technology industry that remains second to none. Second to none, for as long as it takes……to vanquish that is.
And it’s not just about the technology. To make ‘second to none’ a continuing reality, we will need a renaissance of American high technology entrepreneurial marketing based on the proven strategy and tactics of ‘full spectrum market dominance’. There’s still time on the clock to act, still time to vigorously purge the theoretical remnants of the ‘fool’ and ‘dreamer’ mentality of the era of the new economy bubble that are still crippling the health and vitality of the industry.
To be second to none, we need U.S. high technology companies that are strong, growing, and are the dominant players making and changing the rules in the categories they lead. Anything short of this full spectrum market dominance and we might as well just croon along with the legendary ‘Dandy’ Don Meredith of the original Monday Night Football commentary team who, partway through the 4th quarter of blowout, would sing ‘Turn out the lights, the party’s over’ to Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford.
The application of asymmetric marketing is what is called for. It’s not marketing for digital ‘fools’ or spoonfed ‘dreamers’, but for resolute marketing professionals who relate to the word ‘vanquish’. Global interdependency, global customers, global markets are not valid excuses to walk away from this conclusion.
Asymmetric Marketing: Bill Gates Meets Donald Rumsfeld
Downsizing and waiting for an IT spending ‘bounce-back’ or for a new ‘dot gov’ spending bubble based on an imaginary federal digital pork barrel are not options. If you are a CEO and have marketing leadership and a marketing team that makes plans and fills in spreadsheets in anticipation of an e-government pork barrel, get them into a ‘confessional booth’ or a ‘marketing detox center’ as fast as possible. There’s still time to get them off the hard stuff and save their marketing souls.
More than ever before, the US high technology industry needs an approach to marketing strategy that is a fusion of proven best practices in technology category leadership and state-of-the-art military strategy. If this were a movie, it’s title would be ‘Bill Gates meets Don Rumsfeld’, or better yet ‘The Microsoft Way meets the Rumsfeld Way’. Can’t stand Bill Gates or Don Rumsfeld, OK. How about the oft-quoted, never disappointing Sun Tzu, an ancestor and mentor to marketers and business strategists everywhere--“Therefore a victorious army first wins and then seeks battle; a defeated army first battles and then seeks victory.” Win first. Then seek battle. That’s asymmetric marketing strategy in a nutshell.
For those of you that have not gone totally ‘politically correct’ and don’t object to the military metaphor, let’s just say that asymmetric marketing is special ops marketing, with a big dose of ‘no fly zone’ marketing, stealth marketing, and when the time is right, a little shock and awe marketing thrown in for effect. OK, you still want another ‘non-military’ metaphor. How about sports? If marketing was a game of American football, asymmetric marketing might be called no huddle offense marketing, i.e. momentum-based marketing that keeps the defense off-balance and creates vulnerability in the opponent. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Simply put, asymmetric marketers seek to capture an asymmetric advantage over competitors and customers by matching strength to vulnerability on a systematic basis in every dimension of the marketing challenge. Products, models, channels, relationships, positioning, communications and more. Full spectrum market dominance.
Instinctively good marketing people are like the home PC user who never reads the documentation. They have no time for it. Maybe a glance at the quick start page. But they would rather figure it out as they go along. They learn through doing. They learn market warfare through market warfare, to paraphrase Mao TseTung, a practitioner of asymmetry theory who led an army of seriously under-funded, under-equipped peasants in expelling the Japanese from China. Asymmetric marketers, like asymmetric warriors, don’t exclusively follow orthodox, ‘technology adoption cycle’ blue prints in the middle of a full-on war, but do tend to embrace strategy and operational concepts that let’s them make it up as they go along. They embrace the unorthodox, blending it with what works among the orthodoxy of the day.
They seek victory on their timetable (whether long or short) and engage in rapid field-based course corrections. Sometime ‘reacting’ is even more important than ‘pro-acting’. They are reality based, sober field commanders who harness increasing returns technology businesses and complex, self-organizing internet effects. A-marketers (short for asymmetric marketers) practice both orthodox and unorthodox tactics in an infinite number of operational combinations led by experienced managers. Wait. Isn’t this the place where I describe my target readership a little more before moving on. Thank god for that $49 writing seminar at the Learning Annex.
Asymmetric Marketing Audience: Marketing “Boots on the Ground”
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, this is not your father’s high tech marketing theory. My audience, my motto, as in the General Tommy Franks ‘network-centric’ war model, is ‘All Power to the Field Commanders & Troops’. It’s the soldiers, the marketing ‘boots on the ground’ that win marketing wars. The marketing ‘army of one’. That’s where the real marketing wisdom and the hunger and ability to apply it lives.
Many instinctive asymmetric marketers, possessed of common sense and common wisdom, have titles like Product Manager, Communications Director, Channel Manager, e-business manager…you know the titles. I have spoken to and shared ideas with hundreds of these folks over the course of my research and work, and many of them would like to see the theoretical vestiges of ‘new economy thinking’ die out, and something new, more rugged, practical and sustainable born.
I also want to communicate these ideas to my colleagues working in creative shops and marketing communications agencies, the PR pros and the interactive marketers, the strategy boutiques and the thousands upon thousands of rank and file contractors and consultants who are invested in the outcome we all want, to remain ‘second to none’. To vanquish.
My audience understands instinctively that innovative tech companies bear a disproportionate sense of responsibility for the survival of the U.S. as the leader of the free world. Like the Israeli tech industry, they want to step up and contribute to the fight. Why focus on the America thing? Not because I am some kind of total right wing national chauvinist but because this is where I live, where I and my children are personally threatened, where I need to contribute. It’s not just about money but about survival, and the continuity of an industry. Like Jim Cramer, I have become a hawk, an asymmetric marketing hawk.
The New eFront
If the technology industry is indispensible what do you call those indispensible tech companies? How about the eFront. The eFront is the high technology electronic ‘front’ in the war to create both homeland and economic security while ‘vanquishing’ the enemy. My hope is that what I call asymmetric marketing will become customized and applied by the emerging generation of eFront startups and startovers post-bubble, post 9/11 and in the thick of the war on jihadist terror and rogue states possessing weapons of mass destruction. A-marketing is optimized for these bootstrap-capable tech startups that are growing up and succeeding in the new uncertainty. A-marketers leverage opportunities on the eFront including the transformation undertaking government IT. As in the creation of radar in World War II, like the Israeli innovations in digital security, real-time instant messaging, or like the American government’s role in the creation of the internet itself, government and the private sector eFront need to become close partners.
My eFront audience is concentrated in the most ‘mission critical’ categories relative to the new mission. They are in new categories of software, complexity-driven ebusiness, business continuity, digital security, enterprise integration, web services, mobility, collaboration and pre-emptive knowledge management---we need to not just pinpoint Iraqi armor under a bridge but terrorist sleeper cells under our noses. eFront companies also focus on the new uncertainty-driven applications like silent commerce, identity management, smart cards and biometrics.
Learning from history my audience is not all that concerned with blueprints to build perfect whole products in artificially sustained VC funded startups. They know they are operating in an atmosphere of quantum uncertainty and want to leverage asymmetric marketing principles to create certainty from the vulnerability of their opponents.
Experience Matters
For the eFront commandos in the tech industry, experience matters. They instinctively embrace ‘tribal wisdom’ that flows from experience, not closed-loop, linear theory, or academic critique. Tribal wisdom is held by the ‘elders’ or old timers who often reside in the middle of your organization.
Another metaphor. Let’s think of the high tech industry as a ‘self help group’ that needs to share experience to overcome it’s ‘addiction’ or ‘dysfunction’. In self-help groups, for the whole spectrum of ‘dysfunctional’ behaviors, it’s the ‘old timers’ that are the ones that newer members look to for wisdom. Seniority is built in. A-marketers seek this kind of old timer wisdom.
Having had some ‘visibility’ into the internal operating processes of self-help groups for many years, one of my favorite pieces of ‘old timer’ wisdom is this: “It’s the smart ones that have the most trouble getting sober.” Broken down, it means that successful people often resist change, and instead rationalize their problem by building elaborate denial systems in their minds. (Denial Systems………wasn’t that a withdrawn bubble IPO, stock symbol DENY?)
The corollary of this old timer wisdom is that the ‘dumb ones are teachable’. Since I count myself among ‘dumb ones’ or ‘teachable ones’, I think this truth applies well to the lessons of the tech meltdown. The ‘smart ones had the most trouble admitting the problems that were staring them in the face at the thousands of companies that went into the dotcom death spiral. Even with the collapse of guru magazines like the Industry Standard, the digital ‘smart ones’ are still sugarcoating the industry challenges we face, romanticizing the wreckage that occurred, and spinning the facts. We asymmetric marketers like to live, in a ‘no spin zone’, to quote Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly. The ‘boots on the ground’ know that only a summation of experience and proven practices are the road to victory. Spin can you get you killed, in war and in life, and in the marketing organizations of challenged companies.
Four Dimensions of Asymmetric Marketing
There are 4 dimensions of asymmetric marketing. Dimensions…. Oops. Forgot I was writing for myself, i.e. one of the dumb ones. Let me begin again. If asymmetric marketing, or for short, ‘a-marketing’ was an intersection, here is what sits at the four corners.
Let’s start with culture.
Copyright 2001-2003, Joseph E. Bentzel. All Rights Reserved.
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