For those of you who think that marketing is a sanitized form of warfare that functions like a release valve for people living in the pressure-cooker of commerce, please rewrite that definition.

Marketing is war. Its generals (who have books with titles such as "Guerrilla Marketing Attack" on their desk) plan strategies, often deploying foot soldiers, reconnaissance missions and spies into enemy territory. Sometimes they even employ Rambo-like scare tactics just to disorient the guys on the other side of the trench. In the text-book manoeuvre, these battles were often fought by lawyers whose fire-power should never have been underestimated. Revlon sued Proctor & Gamble, accusing it of disparaging their 'colour stay' line of lipsticks that were supposed to not rub off on teeth, glass or men. Dial sued 3M over a package design, and Digital Equipment Corporation sued Intel accusing the premier chip manufacturer of stealing its microprocessor design. Nothing wrong with that. These legal boxing matches take place all the time. In the chip war it was slightly different. Here was Digital attacking Intel who was its supplier, continuing to do business with the company, an indication of the shameless full-frontal in-your-face approach to competing in the American marketplace.

Take the case of a man dressed up as a bandicoot who arrives at the headquarters of another company yelling out "your worst nightmare has arrived". As Disney-like as this stunt may seem, it was part of a serious launch of a product that fights for share of minds in the computer game category. Sony Play-station, feeling the heat of arch-rival Nintendo, wanted to send a message to the Seattle company that this was not child's play. But why a bandicoot of all critters, you ask? Sony's new game featured the hero "Crash Bandicoot", so what better way to scare the daylights out of the competition by sending an emissary to the front line to declare war? Sometimes the aggressor won't even wait for the opposition to catch his breath. Burger King knows it cannot afford to take its eye off McDonald's, and will not let anything distract it from throwing punches at the enemy. Undeterred by the worst recall (250 million pounds of of hamburger-meat contaminated with the E-Coli bacteria) in the industry, Burger King went after the 19 million customers-a-day rival that was still recouping after at least two product launches that bombed. In war, this is an often-used tactic : engaging the big guns, just to sap the enemy of its fire-power. Burger King is now going head-to-head with the Big Mac with its new secret weapon, the "Big King". It's hitting hard, especially in two vulnerable areas of taste and price, two elements that set the Big Mac apart, and two elements that contributed to McDonald's most recent mis-steps. McDonald's positioning of its new product the 'Arch De Luxe' to adult taste, has still to prove financially viable. Since its products are always aimed at children, trying to go after an adult market had caused serious loss of identity, something that Burger King quickly turned to its advantage. Then there was the miserable failure by McDonald's to beat Burger King on price, by forcing its franchisees to add a fifty-five cent burger to its menu. "No way" they replied, telling the parent company where to get off, and despite expensive advertising, the product was pulled.

But don't for a moment imagine that McDonald's has lost its spunk. It's an open secret now that they are testing their own scud missile to counter the Burger King's "Whopper" remarkably priced at just ninety-nine cents. Text-book marketers argue to death that you can't really win by competing on price, but it all depends on whose side of the trench you are on. In the Burger King camp they boast that no-one who copied their pricing strategy has been able to dislodge the Whopper --yet. The other burger outlets however bemoan the fact that this ninety-nine cents loss leader strategy is to blame for bringing down the base price of the sandwich. But this is a dirty war; there are no such things as "innocent civilians". Even your own citizens (a.k.a. 'franchises') could turn against you.

RE-INVENTING YOURSELF

Ask PepsiCo who's had to divest itself of its food franchises KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut who were themselves struggling to keep up with the aggressive killer strategies of copy-cat pizza parlours and casual dining outlets like Red Lobster. While PepsiCo had been engaged in a protracted war against the Cola-Cola empire, it had been slowly bleeding red ink in its food divisions. But the company whose battle cry caused Coca Cola to make the most costly blunder in marketing history, takes the Cola war almost literally, with battle strategies that seem like they were dreamed up in a defense academy. The year was 1993; the country was Mexico. The Pepsi-controlled bottler declared war on the territory with 'Operation Desert Storm'. Instead of Hummer trucks and parachute drops, they deployed a huge sales force in army fatigues, riding in 200 trucks to installed 10,000 coolers in the marketplace.

Today, irrespective of what brand or category you are up against, you should be either preparing to attack or planning retaliatory measures would you face an onslaught. If it's jeans, I bet you think Levi's occupies the fortress. In computer printers, you'd automatically think Hewlett Packard is king of the hill. Right and wrong. Even strong brands like these need to keep fighting to keep their lead, and are growing uncomfortable with smaller upstarts taking pot shots at their market share. Arizona Jeans (which has nothing to do with the state of Arizona) is a private label department store brand that has quietly nudged up to number three position after Levi's and Lee. How did they do it? The secret was to do the things that the big two were too slow to arrive at, while targeting youth. If that sounds like what Pepsi did to Coke by in the eighties, by inventing a "Pepsi generation," it is. The jeans category, like the cola category is fiercely competitive, and relying on the conventional planks of marketing are proving adequate. Arizona jeans' new weapons in dethroning the one with the red tab are web sites and rock groups. Now of course Levi's has a web site; and has been credited with being on of the early pioneers in the trend of 'mass customization' -- allowing a person to feed their hip and thigh measurements into a store computer and have the finished article delivered to their doorstep. But somehow even this isn't enough to lock in the market share.

Likewise, Hewlett-Packard, the blue jeans of the computer printer category, is facing multiple nightmares with players in the camera, colour printer, scanner and software market grabbing at it from every direction. You know there's trouble coming when you see players like Canon quietly turning their colour printers into scanners, and Kodak making inroads into scanner market with a camera that uses a floppy disk instead of a film. Hewlett-Packard is fighting back by launching into the photography market centered around printers that eliminate the need to send off your film to a photo-lab.

REPRISE OF THE BURGER WARS

Meanwhile at the McDonald's bunker, the war hasn't been exactly going their way, despite it selling over hundred million units of the problem called the Arch De-Luxe. In a deplorable example of bad image marketing, McDonald's 'won' the McLibel court battle (for a paltry $98,000 in damages) against two obscure vegetarian activists in England, but lost the PR war. The judge ruled that yes, McDonald's ads were bad because they enticed children, and that the company was unfair to its workers and cruel to the animals it slaughtered for its meat. Talk about a public relations nightmare! That's just what a company like McDonald's doesn't need when it's fighting a protracted war among other burger and fast food outlets. No-one doubts that what really sells for McDonald's is ambiance rather than product, so it is surprising to everyone but the savvy marketers at the Golden Arches corporate office that they have forgotten what business they were really in. Just like the legendary New Coke fiasco, McDonald's worst nightmare is in finding itself attempting to defend not the sizzle, but the steak.