How to Plan a Battle, Launch a Company, and Run Your Instagram Account

If you hate reading, I’ll give you the two word answer: proceed indirectly. Attacking an enemy directly rarely leads to victory and surely includes lots of casualties. Penetrating the market directly often leads to bloody war in business with a race to the bottom on price as a final ditch effort. And, Instagram is so noisy that if you’re not careful you’ll be the 50,000,000th influencer whose message is drowned out amongst the crowd.

When facing entrenched competition, never play head on. 

The immortal warrior, thought-leader Sun Tzu says it simply in the art of war:

“In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory. 

Surely, not all of life is reduced to the metaphors of war, but this idea keeps immerging. Sun Tzu said it and then after World War I B. H. Liddell Hart further made the case for indirect approaches on the battlefield:

“Throughout the ages, effective results in war have rarely been attained unless the approach has had such indirectness as to ensure the opponent’s unreadiness to meet it…”

In peacetime, indirectness pays dividends, too. This, after all, is the entire business strategy known as the Blue Ocean Strategy, that tends to reign true for every single notoriously successful business in the game.

In short the strategy says it doesn’t pay to play along in the ruthless blood-in-the-water business landscape. Instead, companies that create value and success decide where they will compete against no one. This indirectness is ultimately how Apple wins with the ultimate user experience of simplicity and Amazon wins with supreme convenience, for example. 

Marketing is the same way. In a word, where marketers want to make a profound signal, one must not contribute to the noise. It’s noisy to follow the crowds. That’s why we fight like Sun Tzu at my company Agency : Standard, for example. 

Hopefully there are enough diverse examples here to make the point. If you want to win big, there’s likely an easier way and it’s not through the front door.