As business people, we can appreciate and learn from the great empires of all time. There were the ancient Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Ottomans, the Spanish, French, and finally the British. The British were famous for their simple yet effective strategy — divide and conquer! As business people, we need to study and learn from the great military minds of the past as their knowledge can sometimes cross-apply to our businesses.
How do you divide and conquer?
The more the world changes, the more it stays the same. Technology keeps changing, but human nature, good writing, and war strategy does not. Analytics provides a way to divide an industry or market into segments. A good marketer understands the different segments and also understands which ones he wants to target for profit. The difference between business and war is that you are not trying to defeat or divide your customers or the market. You are trying to do a siege of someone else’s customers by offering them something better. The dividing part is done by segmenting and using metrics. The conquering part happens when you woo them away from their existing business relationships.
Weakening your competition
If you are a cut throat business person, you will want to weaken your competition. You will want to render their advertising campaigns as useless. You will want to undercut their prices and out-do them on service. If you can cause disloyalty among their troops, all the better. Business is like war. How you play the game is up to you. Many people are quite civilized while others are very brutal and engage in lying, cheating, lawsuits, and more!
Undivide!
If you gradually create very strong bonds with valuable clients and suppliers, you are in a sense undividing yourself which is a key to success. Business is based on connections between people who can help each other, so the better you get at initiating and maintaining strong bonds, the better!