Al-Qaida school of marketing

I have very little sympathy for those brands who insist on their ‘tried and tested’ marketing plan that is essentially the same flawed document recycled year after year, the only change being a slight variance in spend.

Think Woolworths, MFI… or anyone else who is wondering why they are finding themselves in difficulty.

The plan looks a little like this:

When told by their agencies, advisors, partners, suppliers and FINALLY their bosses to experiment, the marketing team attached to their (legacy) model come back with something like this:

 

It’s not about including any one form of media that they are currently leaving off the plan… instead, all I would ask anyone to do is try and embrace CHANGE.

Look at what is going on in the world around you and if you can’t see it with your own eyes… LISTEN. Your potential customers are constantly leaving clues and in some cases making outright statements as to what they want to buy and how they expect to buy it, you just need to know where to look.

What was missing from the ridiculously simplified slides above?

“Digital” is the word most people arrive at but in my opinion, LOGIC is more apt.

Here is an unlikely example as blogged by Wired:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Online jihadists have already used YouTube, blogs and other social media to spread their propaganda. Now, a group of internet Islamic extremists is putting together a plan for “invading Facebook.”

“We can use Facebook to fight the media,” notes a recent posting on the extremist al-Faloja forum, translated by Jihadica.com. “We can post media on Facebook that shows the Crusader losses.”

“We have already had great success in raiding YouTube,” the poster adds. “American politicians have used Facebook to get votes, like the house slave Obama.”

Groups like al-Qaida were pioneering users of the internet — to train, share ideas and organize. But some observers, like George Washington University professor Marc Lynch, see a reluctance to embrace Web 2.0 tools like Facebook. “One of the biggest problems for a virtual network like AQ today is that it needs to build connections between its members while protecting itself from its enemies.  That’s a filtering problem: How do you get your people in, and keep intelligence agents out?” he asks.

But as Jihadica.com author and West Point Combating Terrorism Center fellow William McCantsnotes, the proposed Facebook invasion “is not an attempt to replicate [existing] social networks.” Instead, “the members of the campaign want to exploit existing networks of people who are hostile to them and presumably they will adopt new identities once they have posted their material.”

The al-Faloja poster suggests seven “brigades” work together within Facebook. One will distribute videos and writing of so-called “martyrs.” Another will spread military training material. Most of them will work in Arabic, presumably. But one of the units will focus just on spread English-language propaganda through Facebook.

Amazing on so many levels.