Quote Originally Posted by Rank amateur View Post
In your massive array of cognitive - and other - knowledge do you have any theories/techniques on how soldiers involved in COIN can better perceive the needs of the local population. (As a marketing guy, it seems to me that we're selling what we have have - democracy, political reconciliation, security - when what the Iraqi's want is local autonomy, to settle old scores, homogeneous neighborhoods etc.) More Arab speakers, cultural advisors etc. isn't going to change that. A business that makes that mistake quickly starts producing more desirable products or goes bankrupt. Here the theory seems to be that if the proper tactics are applied long enough the people will change what they want. Of course, it's possible that the majority is right. Marc, do you have theories that indicate basic marketing principles don't apply in a COIN environment and that marketing guys like me should just keep quiet while the pros get their work done?
I for one would submit that in a COIN operation (I was originally going to say "fight" but thought better of it, due to the connotations associated with "fight."), marketing guys are at least as, if not more, precious than operations guys (that is "operations" in the business sense).

You made a point that I thought should have been intuitively obvious since the days of the Edsel. If you do not give the people what they want, they will stay away in droves from your offerings. Of course, the real good marketing work is to get the potential customer base to want your products before you ever put them out on the street. Hollywood does a great job at this with its promo trailers. The corollary here is that getting people to change their preferences after your product is out on the shelves often is a very tough row to hoe. (Remember the new Coke/classic Coke debacle?)


Seems to me that we didn't do either one of these things--find out what the people really want (intel) or get them to want what we planned to offer (Psyops/IO)-- before we opted back in 2003 to start an operation that we believed would make Iraq better for the Iraqis, and the world a better place for all of us. Any one remember how long it took Ford to recover? (I think it wasn't until the Mustang came along.)