Ad Strategies for Brand Warfare

Max Sutherland

Develops a theory for understanding advertising, using a military analogy: in marketing, there are attack forces and occupation forces.

Ad Strategies for Brand Warfare

Dr Max Sutherland

Military analogies are common in marketing. We launch campaigns, target audiences and do battle for the mind. Some years ago, I formulated a military analogy that made sense of a lot of ad tracking data and proved valuable in thinking about advertising generally. It is this: In marketing, as in the military, there are attack forces and there are occupation forces. They play different roles with different strengths and weaknesses.

At the time we had tracked many hundreds of ad campaigns, all of them continuously and some of them over long...

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