Todd Helmus one of the authors of RAND’s recent monograph titled: Enlisting Madison Avenue The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, was on NPR’s Talk Of The Nation today. Helmus did about as well as a person could do considering the topic and the environment. Click here for a replay and blog comments. Here are a few of my take-aways from the interview:
1. In general the media, marketers and agencies will not give the monograph a fair reading.
2. The concept of shaping as addressed in the RAND monograph can help win the war on terror faster, and with fewer casualties, if implemented properly.
3. Madison Ave. does not have the core culture necessary to successfully implement shaping concepts.
4. John Boyd speaks of shaping in terms of interaction and isolation.
Effective marketers understand and exploit these forces in order to
build interaction with targeted customers while assertively isolating
competitors from targeted customers. In the case of theaters of operation, the military marketer increases positive interactions with civilians while isolating and eliminating terrorist impact and influence.
5. We’ve taken Boyd’s O-O-D-A Loop and modified it for civilian
marketing efforts. We call this modified version a campaign engine – it
can be used to drive civilian and military marketing campaigns. A short
briefing is here.
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More to come…
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