Leaders' Blog

Battle Vs War-----Guerilla Marketing Can Be Dangerous

Kevin Wang signing in to kick off the discussion on my Technology Marketing Center case study: How Not to Execute Guerilla Warfare

One of the readings from the course was "Marketing Warfare". It was such a "Wow!" experience that I recommended it to almost all my colleagues to read. Although "fight" is the word we used a lot to talk about winning business opportunities, it was "Marketing Warfare" that made me to realize that sales job is more to win each of the battles while marketing job is actually about the war that is made up of those battles.

And then from there, by using this warfare analogy, I started to see the answers to my questions that I brought up in my last post. For example, all the battles that I had been involved as a salesman were actually part of the war which should be governed by the overall "war strategy" that was setup by marketing people. And a wrong strategy could easily put a battle in a wrong place at a wrong time which would be extremely bloody and even somehow you won the battle by your superior troops but still they simply could not hold it.

One of the most important parts of the strategy is a "Fighting Map" which should be able to tell the sales troops to where to land, where to entrench, where to attack and how to march there. The key point here is: It should not be something "static", it should be "dynamic" which means a brilliant strategy should not just talk about what the target applications are or who the target customers are; a brilliant strategy with a real fighting map should do better job on pointing out a "marching path" to lead the troops from where they landed to where they should advance to.

How to get the "map"? Let's talk about it next time......

Saving Private Kevin-----Guerilla Marketing Can Be Dangerous

Kevin Wang signing in to kick off the discussion on my Technology Marketing Center case study: How Not to Execute Guerilla Warfare

During my time fighting in the front line as a sales manager, one of the frustrations was that you spent huge effort to win an account, only to be kicked out by your competitors soon after. It was like you led your troops to conquer a real fortress after some bloody fight, yet before you could really enjoy the victory, you found yourself under siege by your enemies, unable to survive simply because you don't have enough resource to hold it.

Time and time again, I asked: What's wrong with it?! Why can't the company support us as we requested? Why can the enemy get back so quickly and easily? How can we build up a barrier quickly and high enough to prevent them? We kept on trying this and trying that, and we did make some improvement in certain circumstances, but still in majority of the time we just couldn't hang on.

Then I transferred from sales to marketing, working in headquarters. By standing in the new position which is relatively higher (more macro), I started to view these frustrations in a different way: Maybe even before we launched our attack on some of those targets, by destiny, it would be failure. And later on, Chris Halliwell and her course at Caltech helped me uncover the puzzles which I'll talk about more in my next post......

 

Saving Private Kevin-----Guerilla Marketing Can Be Dangerous

Kevin Wang signing in to kick off the discussion on my Technology Marketing Center case study: How Not to Execute Guerilla Warfare

I bet the title reminds you that extraordinary bloody fighting movie made by Steven Spielberg. Yes, sometimes marketing warfare can be as cruel as the real war especially when you were in the side to be saved.

My name is Kevin and I am a soldier fighting for my company who is making electrical test & measurement instruments for electronic products. Our company has been fighting primarily in semiconductor, wireless communications areas, while I, as an experienced private, had served in both sales roles and marketing roles for this company before running away after the decisive failure of launching a new attack on the Cell Phone Production test market (as discussed in my case study).

And on my way running out of the battle field, I was saved by a very good person named Chris Halliwell at her place: TMC, who triggered a lot of thinking about why we failed in our attack and what we might have done differently when I participated in her excellent course "Strategic Marketing of Technology Products". That was the moment I realized to win a war like this you need not only a general Dwight Eisenhower but also a general George Marshall who could really give the troops the right fighting maps as well as winning strategies.

Anyway, it was at TMC and with the help from Chris that I wrote a case study about this painful failure. And I do hope that by sharing this, we can learn something together to make our next operation a success.