Sun Tzu was a great military strategist and
gifted marshal of 506 BC China. He wrote the oldest and most respected
military strategy book--Art of War. Sun Tzu’s military strategies have
been applied to business, especially advertising and marketing. The
Chinese saying “the marketplace is a battlefield” (Tung, 1994) best reflects
the use of military principles in competition. Although applying
Sun Tzu’s strategies to business is not a new invention--Chinese businessmen
have relied on Art of War since 400 BC--the amount of discussion today
is indeed unprecedented.
Applications of Art of War to advertising and
marketing can be roughly classified into four categories: Direct translation
(Goldenberg 1997), interpretation with examples (Cheung, 1990; McNeilly
1996), business packages developed through Sun Tzu’s strategies (Yuan,
1991), and “Winning models” evolved from Art of War (Ho and Choi 1997).
Though war is still a favorite metaphor, changes
have occurred in marketing. Marketers now recognize the importance
of establishing long-term cooperative relationships with direct competitors--their
once opponents. Examples can easily be found in the computer and
semiconductor industries. Today, IBM, Apple, and Motorola collaborate to
spread the risk of new technology development and establish broad-based
industry standards. In these and many other industries, the rising
cost of new product development makes information sharing and joint research
and development a necessity. Therefore, a more modern metaphor/paradigm
is needed. One possible new framework is to supplement and complement
the current metaphor--a combination of Sun Tzu’s strategy with some key
ideas drawn from modern Confucianism (Chen and Wells 1998). By introducing
Confucianism into the marketing metaphor, this framework acknowledges the
complexities of modern marketing. In a way, it compensates
for the insufficiencies of Sun Tzu’s strategies.
Now the question is, can a model based upon
two ancient Chinese sages fit modern markets? And, can a model imbued
with oriental ideas helps Western marketers who want to conduct business
in Eastern markets, especially, “Greater China”? To date, despite the popularity
of the employment of Sun Tzu’s strategies in the practical marketing, no
academic systematic investigation has been made to compare the effectiveness
of various paradigms/models generated from Sun Tzu’s strategies.
This scarcity calls for future research on this important topic.
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