The art and the science of strategic marketing: synergizing Sun Tzu's Art of War with game theory

Abstract

In general, there are two approaches to competitive decision-making — the art and the science. The ‘art’ school can be represented by Sun Tzu's Art of War, while game theory probably best represents the ‘scientific’ school of thought. Researchers who follow either of these approaches tend to ignore the other. This paper shows that the two approaches should not be viewed as mutually exclusive. Instead, they can be used to complement each other so as to provide a more complete analysis of a given strategic scenario. By applying both Sun Tzu's principles of war and game theory to analyse a marketing problem, both approaches of strategic thinking are shown to be consistent with each other. This is possible by drawing on the strengths of both approaches so that precision and realism are attained.