Weaponized Marketing

Defeating Islamic Jihad with Marketing That Built the World's Top Brands

By (author) Lisa Merriam, Milton Kotler

Publication date:

29 April 2020

Length of book:

168 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Dimensions:

264x186mm
7x10"

ISBN-13: 9781538137536

Islamic jihadists win with marketing. Terrorism is a form of marketing; an act of communication as much as it is an act of violence. While much has been written about the growing sophistication of marketing by Islamic jihadists, what is missing is a solution.

Today, the Middle East is going through tectonic change with a promising new generation hungry for a different world. We need a better approach. We must fight back with a marketing battle plan.

Weaponized Marketing: Defeating Islamic Jihad with Marketing That Built the World's Top Brands offers a blueprint for success in the marketplace of ideas. This book breaks new ground by applying proven business methods to intractable military and diplomatic problems. It provides a comprehensive understanding of how marketing works and how terrorists use it. Most importantly, it presents an effective alternative to the failing efforts to argue through a “counter-narrative” and spread through social media.

Where bullets, bombs, policy papers, and press releases have failed, a marketing approach—radical for government—has a solid track record for businesses that built the world’s most successful brands.
When President Reagan assumed the Presidency, he turned to a Hollywood legend --Charles Wick—to completely revamp the arms of the US government that told America’s story to the world. The US Information Agency was thus transformed. What this new book does is explain even the very bad guys—and ISIS and Islamic terrorists are indeed thugs—have a strongly held narrative and ideology that they have aggressively pursued especially through social media but also using the traditional dominant media as well. To a very large extent, the United States and its partners in this fight against those who employ terror against us, have failed to understand the very persuasive power of this jihadi weaponization, and have also abysmally failed to develop our own counter argument. If we are not part of the debate the narrative will be determine by those totalitarian elements that want to see our civilization end. It is time we woke up and understood telling our story well will determine whether or not our children and grandchildren also have such a story to tell as well.