I’ve argued in the past for avoiding the use of military concepts and terminology in marketing:
Drawing firepower and vocabulary from military strategy classics, traditional business and marketing center on the opposition of us versus them: marketers broadcast campaigns of carefully crafted messages to static target groups via a variety of touchpoints….
Sustainable marketing, that is, marketing toward the triple bottom line of Prosperity, Planet, and People, blurs the opposition…. It’s us and us now. We care and share responsibility for the same planet. We participate in the same community. We all prosper if we all prosper.
All good and fine, and I stand by it. It seems, however, there is one military concept that may be helpful in building a sustainable business: the ink blot strategy. The ink blot (or oil spot – but we really don’t like oil, do we) strategy is a classic “counterinsurgency strategy of grabbing a piece of terrain, stabilizing it and gradually expanding it.”
I know, I know, the use of the strategy has been controversial in many cases – no counterinsurgency is without challenges. But take the military aspects out of the narrative and you have a useful framework for growing your sustainable business:
- Establish a base. This can be your friends and family, a group of your first customers, or other natural early adopters (nerds). They’ll test your product and give you constructive feedback. Treat them like the pioneers they are.
- Stabilize the base. Get to know your base better than you know yourself. Enable them to shape your company and your product. Meanwhile, make improvements to your product, distribution, and promotion, to prepare for further expansion.
- Expand. Ask your base to talk about you (they will if your product rules and you treated them right in the first two phases). Encourage them with incentives to bring repeated or new business in.
- Repeat.
The ink blot strategy belongs to sustainable marketing because it enables you to grow organically. You bite off only what you can chew. You only sell however much is needed. You work on expansion only after you stabilize your position in a smaller portion of your target group. The ink blot makes your marketing more manageable.
***
Image credit: designshard
