E-Marketing Professionals

Titles like Guerrilla Marketing and Marketing Warfare, rife with military reference and application, bear this out. The applications themselves have become more than mere metaphor or allegory. Many military texts have become handbooks for strategic planning at the corporate level. Today, the words of General George Patton, Napoleon Bonaparte and even Genghis Khan are finding their way into corporate boardrooms. The parallels between the challenges faced by these famous military leaders and many of America's top companies are not coincidental.

We talked about the word strategy earlier as defined from the classic military perspective. From a business standpoint, you may want to consider the following definition:

Strategy is the coordination of the means to achieve the desired ends as they are defined by corporate policy.

The nature of business strategy is much like that of military strategy in that it pits company against company, marketing team against marketing team, and product against product. Ultimately, however, it's a case of mind against mind. No matter how large an organization is, or how expansive its management or marketing team, it all boils down to that simple concept.

In warfare, it was the invasion strategy defined in Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's mind positioned against the strategic defenses conceived and produced by Gen. Irwin Rommel that led to an ultimately successful Allied landing at Normandy Beach. History is replete with similar examples—and so is business. Eisenhower's plan was the result of almost a year's research and development by the finest minds in the Allied armies, with a strategic launch based on the results of that effort. And that's very much like business.

Understanding the human element of strategic development— that concept of mind (your corporate goals or objectives) versus mind (your competition's objectives)—is central to understanding the concept behind strategic development. You aren't merely trying to get on the good side of consumers in hopes that they will try your product. Often that's the easy part. The hard part is fending off at¬tacks from competitors old and new who are interested in upsetting your strategies and causing you to lose market share and drop out of the competitive race. In fact, the twin cornerstones in any strategic development focus on the following: